“The IRA?! You didn’t say anything about the IRA!”
Walters was sure he’d lost him.
Eban eventually spoke. “Well… were they?”He felt stupid. What did it really matter?
“There were originally six of them… I think they’ve all been tarred with the same brush.”
“Not literally,” Eban knee-jerked; then winced. “Sorry… bad joke.”
Walters ignored it and pushed on.
“Look Eban, I appreciate this. There will be other people there with you. John Hickey, for one. You’re relieving someone from a twelve-hour shift – some volunteers; community workers – then somebody will come to relieve you.”
Silence on the other end.
“I’ve done my shift.”
Still nothing.
“I really appreciate this.”
All of Eban’s instincts screamed no fucking way!
But as he looked around the grey-and-beige-induced brain death of his prefabricated hut, something desperate and primal in him cried out for change.
For animation.
For affirmation.
For excitement.
And besides, wasn’t this why he’d come back from England in the first place: to make a difference?
“What was it like… in there I mean?”
“No problem, really – playing cards; sitting around; chatting. They’re just kids…”
Eban heard someone enter the outer office. It galvanised him to make a definitive decision.
He heard himself say, “I’ll do it.”
“What?”
“I SAID I’LL DO IT, FOR FUCK SAKE! DO YOU NEED IT IN WRITING?!”
Walters tried not to be too obvious but his relief was palpable. He thanked him again, gave him some directions and hung up.
Eban absentmindedly worked an elastic band around his fingers several times, cutting off the blood supply and leaving temporary weals.
Jesus… this fuckin’ place… he thought.
23
Shankill Road,
Belfast, Northern Ireland
May 1970
By afternoon he’d finished the Beano summer special and two Fantastic Four comics. He’d ploughed through his Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie horror mags as well.
American imports, they would have proved expensive if purchased new, but Eban traded for these regularly at Smithfield Market secondhand bazaar.
The low sun was slanting in through the skylight.
Through the gaps in the sheeting and the bolt-holes pockmarking them. Shafts of light shone down and through, criss-crossing the interior, making it look like the deck of some kind of spacecraft.
He walked amongst them, putting his hands underneath the beams.
Enjoying the heat, the glow.
Since he’d been hiding out here, it had become his favourite time of day.
The light made him squint to look directly out onto the street.
To the right he could see the vast, dark mound of Black Mountain.
It was one of the most prominent features of the city, towering above most of West Belfast and reaching a height of some 1,275 feet.
He heard John Parkes, his Sunday school teacher, say that there had been flint and copper finds in the area. That the mountain had deserted farms and overgrown paths joining the fields and homesteads, and trails scattered all over it. On a clear day there were views of Strangford Lough, the Mournes and the Sperrins. Even of Scotland and Donegal.
To his left he could see the whitewashed walls of Jersey Street, Shankill Road Mission Hall, where he was sent regularly on Sunday afternoons and where John Parkes and his son John Junior gave witness.
The hall always caught the late afternoon sunshine, illuminating it spectacularly like some blazing sepulchre.
He liked John Parkes.
Liked the way people deferred to him. The quiet authority he had. His certainty of spiritual belief that rendered the man himself believable.
He was a solid, middle-aged man who always dressed in smart pinstriped suits, shirt and tie.
Psalm 91: He that dwelleth in the shelter of the most high shall abide in the shadow of the almighty.
His go-to scripture.
Eban felt safe when he heard John Parkes intone what seemed to him a contract.
A certainty.
A conviction.
The bald dome of his head was blotched with premature liver spots and one large purple birthmark in the shape of a country.
Or so the boys thought.
They argued whether it reminded them more of Africa than of South America.
They joked that his whole cranium was like a globe of the world.
Eban saw the man’s head as resembling nothing less than the cratered surface of the pale moon itself.
He listened when John Parkes spoke.
In between the Bible readings and the catechism.
The colouring-in books of Old Testament prophets: Daniel in the lions’ den; Elijah ascending into heaven in a chariot of fire; Noah in the belly of the great whale and the born-again sing-song of I will make you fishers of men and Jesus loves me, yes I know.
Somewhere in all of this Eban felt that there was something of value to be had.
To be discovered, cherished and learned from.
Stored away for when he might need it sometime in the future.
John Parkes was a local historian of sorts.
Fiercely proud of his roots and his community, he often told his young charges, “Be proud you’re from the Shankill, boys and girls; in the Irish it means ‘Old Church’ and was otherwise formally ‘the church of the white crossing’: Ecclesia alba de vado. So when people ask you, you tell them, ‘I was born at the crossing of the white church, in the shadow of the black mountain.’”
As a Presbyterian minister, he had raised a few eyebrows during this sensitive time by preaching in his Sunday evening service that they – his congregation – were as Irish as anyone on the island, and that their forefathers, Henry Joy McCracken and William Orr, were something called ‘Dissenters’, and how they had fought and died for that birthright.
Eban’s eyes were growing heavy in the half-light of McGrew’s pub with the remembering, and as late afternoon approached, he stepped gingerly and uncertainly between the detritus.
24
Inside the Cathedral Vestry
10.37pm
Anthony ‘Anto’ Gatusso hovered at the edges of the window, uneasily moving from one side of it to the other.
Suddenly, something engaged him in the street below.
“Piss off Molloy, you fucking pervert!”
He waggled a two-fingered V sign and spoke back over his shoulder.
“It’s Tootsie Molloy. I think there’s a team of them back in the shadows, but I can only see two of them under the light.”
A tired, disembodied voice emerged from the depths of a frayed brown sleeping blanket, its zipper broken. It resembled a giant larva stretched out on a moth-eaten couch.
“You were told, stay away from the window.”
But Anto wasn’t listening.
Instead he bellowed again, “You’re a big man when you’re with your Provo mates, Molloy. I’ll knock your Fuckin’ bollocks in if I get hold of ya!”
“He can’t hear you, Anto.”
A woman’s voice emerged from an antechamber side room which acted as the sacristy and smelled of candles and flowers. It was young and fragile and weary.
“Who’s the other one?”
Anto still stood in the window, gesturing. “What?”
“Who’s the other one with him?”
The young man cupped his hands at the sides of his face and squinted through the glass, pressing his forehead against it.
Suddenly he flattened himself tight against the wall, clearly scared.
“Oh Jesus, it’s Sledger!”
Ruairí Connolly spoke again from the sleeping bag with drained resignation. “I told you: stay away from the fucking window!
”
To one side an older woman placed soft drink cans, crisp packets and chocolate bar wrappers in a black bin liner. She looked exhausted.
Dotted around the floor of the room were unrolled sleeping bags.
A temporary cot had been arranged at the back for the senior citizen.
A tinny portable radio buzzed in the background, keeping the besieged up to date on events outside.
A middle-aged man sat at the long table that ran the length of the small room, shuffling a pack of cards. It was covered with magazines, overripe, mouldering fruit and overflowing ashtrays.
“Who’s Sledger?” he asked without looking up, half-interested.
Sinéad Farran emerged from the antechamber, drying her long, fine brown hair between two small tea towels which were obviously woefully inadequate for the job.
She wore tight leggings and a leopard print top.
She crossed to where her fiancé lay and pushed her small bony ass into a space at his feet.
She was six months pregnant and just turned seventeen.
She looked haggard and pale. Sunken eyes set into brittle-bone fragility.
It was the vodka and fags.
The burgers and chips.
The E and spliffs on the weekend.
Her delicate blue veins showed through the taut, translucent sheath of skin they were wrapped in.
Ruairí’s head and shoulders emerged from the sleeping bag. “A bad man.”
Sinéad corrected him. “A very bad man.”
Anto moved away from the window rapidly and crossed to the table.
He was an attractive young man, with jet-black hair – gelled and side-parted – and the classically Mediterranean good looks that he had inherited from his Italian father.
His large brown eyes perhaps hinted at a soulfulness or depth that was, in truth, absent.
He was animated now, wanting to explain all to the questioner, Conor McVey.
“Sledger used to run the punishments teams. His sister’s house got done and her car got ripped off…” He looked sheepish. “So he’s taken all this kinda personal, like.”
The community worker, whose shift was coming to an end, looked at him disapprovingly.
“We didn’t do it!”
Anto looked pantomime-offended, and toward Ruairí for validation.
“I told ‘em mad bastards, I told Spud and Dinny to leave off of her. Leave well alone.”
It was unclear who he was trying to convince.
Sinéad clamped her hair between the cotton towels and rubbed. “Spud and Dinny are probably in Kerry by now, drinking pints and laughin’.”
Ruairí reached down and rooted around in the bowels of his sleeping bag. He produced a manky-looking brightly-coloured beach towel. It had dolphins jumping through hoops on it.
He threw it the length of himself and it wrapped around Sinéad’s head and shoulders, almost knocking her sideways.
Anto sniggered.
She pulled it off angrily and glared at Ruairí. “That’s where you two should be, instead of acting the hard men… instead of putting us all through this!”
Ruairí became agitated.
“Don’t you be startin’, wee girl. I’m telling you for the last time, me and him” – he nodded at Anto – “we did nothing wrong… nothing at all. Spud and Dinny turned up with the spondulicks. We didn’t ask where they got them. We went out drinking with them, that’s all.”
He looked at the window and across at the huge, heavy wooden door that was the only way in or out of their incarceration.
“God knows, I wish they’d kept their hands in their pockets,” he reflected ruefully.
Mrs Connolly, Ruairí’s mother, was straightening the bedding in the cot that had provided her only fitful sleep since the beginning of the ordeal.
On the table beside this she arranged her various medications and plonked her false teeth into a glass of water, dropping a fizzing cleaning pill in with them.
Years of rearing a family of seven meant that she could quite easily zone out the banter flying back and forth between the young people further up the room.
Sinéad nodded in her direction. “Aye, your ma might believe that oul crap, but I didn’t come down in the last shower.”
Ruairí had risen and – now wearing his sleeping bag pulled up to the chest – was stumbling awkwardly toward a thermos flask over by the makeshift kitchen area.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
It sounded like a challenge. Like he might be ready to up the ante.
Anto, sensing this, got to Sinéad first.
He employed his best conciliatory tone, hands outstretched in supplication.
“What were we supposed to do? Turn down a few free nights’ liquoring because we didn’t know where they got the money from? Cop yourself on, Sinéad.”
Sinéad was having none of it. She narrowed her eyes.
“You knew where they got it alright. Sure, didn’t his ma tell me?”
She turned to speak at Ruairí’s retreating back.
“He hides stuff in a shoebox, behind the hot water boiler. Four hundred quid in twenty-pound notes and two big lumps of hash.”
She began to pull her hair back from her pinched face and tie it. “Aye, you thought I didn’t know about that. Your ma tells me it all. She says you have her nerves wrecked.”
Ruairí spun around threateningly.
“Shut the fuck up! That was from something else. I don’t do houses and I don’t joyride. And leave my ma out of it!”
Mrs Connolly went about her ablutions, indifferent. She did not hear, or did not care.
Sinéad rose to her feet, placing one hand on her hip and stabbing the air with a finger in Ruairí’s direction.
“Shut the fuck up? Wait ‘til I tell you, wee fella, I’m sitting here six months pregnant and you and Einstein and the rest of your dozy crew have dropped us all in the middle of this shit!”
She surveyed the room theatrically.
Anto and Ruairí spoke together in unrehearsed unison. “And don’t we fuckin’ know it.”
They smiled wryly at each other, Anto crossing the room to exchange a half-hearted high-five with his comrade. They both wore tracksuit bottoms and hooded tops.
Their baseball caps lay on the table amongst the debris of their ordeal.
Sinéad, unimpressed, was intent on the last word as usual. “Aye, you know… but do you care?”
Ruairí suddenly seemed deflated.
Fatigue swept discernibly across his pale face.
For a moment he looked very young. He had in that instant decided that withdrawal from this arena of conflict was the smart play.
Eyes widening, he appealed to her.
“Look, you’re doing my head in… how does any of this help? Do you not think I’ve enough to be worried about? You’ll need my ma if I have to go away. Your ma would be no help with a wee baby.”
Sinéad looked around the room, arms open, as if appealing to an invisible audience.
“Oh, so now he is going away. I wish he’d make his mind up.”
She was stabbing a finger at Ruairí again. “If you’d told the Provos that a week ago, we wouldn’t still be in here.”
Unexpectedly, Anto exploded. He seemed to be verging on tears of anger. Or maybe fear.
“It’s a death threat you heartless bitch… you know? A death threat!”
He put his finger to his temple and pulled the imaginary trigger.
The room went pin-drop quiet again. And again they became aware of the noise from outside. Unceasing vitriol directed at them alone.
Conor was the first to react.
He was full of mock bonhomie, believing this to be his job.
But he knew as well as anyone.
Maybe better.
He’d been listening more closely to the radio than the others.
Listening, every hour on the hour. And still no-one brave or stupid enough to take a decision on whether they were all tech
nically trespassing on church property or not.
The diocese might still evict the lads from the cathedral grounds.
They were at a standstill.
In limbo.
“C’mon folks, everybody’s tired… nobody’s going anywhere. Your wee baby needs his da to be around. There are plenty of people – good people – out there who are prepared to stand behind you on this.”
Ruairí and Anto exchanged a cynical glance.
They both turned their backs on Conor and Sinéad, who rubbed her eyes hard and flopped back onto the couch, deflated.
Anto crossed to the window and looked out tentatively.
“Oh aye? Well, where the fuck are they then? I can only see kneecappers out there. Where’s the RUC when you need them? Those lunatics could come through that door anytime they felt like it.”
All eyes turned to the heavy door with its cumbersome circular ornamental handle and slide bolt.
Sturdy, certainly, and capable of repelling intruders from a bygone age. But archaic and unreliable now.
Sinéad suddenly looked genuinely frightened and began to gnaw earnestly and agitatedly at her fingernails.
Mrs Connolly – who had heard everything but registered nothing – abruptly straightened and pulled a bed sheet up to her throat.
“Well… I’m here,” offered Conor McVey pathetically.
Ruairí and Anto laughed sardonically.
Conor looked wounded.
Ruairí, seeing this, crossed to the man and placed a hand on his arm.
“Conor, we know you’re a bit of veteran at this and all. Eamon O’Brien told us what you did in the 70s, with the civil rights crowd, I mean – mediation and all that…”
Sinéad noted the man’s injury as well. “And coming here to sit a twelve-hour shift in this hole… not many would do it.”
“Aye, fair enough… fair dues,” said Ruairí and poured a cup of tea from the flask, handing it to the older man. He sat down beside him and pushed a packet of Jaffa Cakes across the table. He paused as if something had been bothering him, and then spoke.
“Look… I don’t mean to worry you – maybe you haven’t thought about this, mate – but don’t your people live on our estate too? These guys could be up there right now, at your mother and father’s house, smashing windows; burning…”
White Church, Black Mountain Page 10