Simon Kerr

by Rainbow Singer (lit)

  But let me ask you a question, man - if you had to run for miles, stalk and kill an animal yourself every time you wanted to eat the luxury of Mother Nature's flesh, would you eat so much meat? I have to say that I'm a killer and that I wouldn't: even if, like a cowboy, I'd herded the prey animals together and kept them near me so I didn't have to run for miles before the kill. I'd rather eat fruits, berries, nuts, corn, wheat - whatever I could gather and grow. But then, that's why I turned vegetarian six years ago - not because I want to be awkward, like the Warden says.

  Vegetarian-to-be or not, I ate that damn burger after the Rev said grace - even though it was totally rare with blood. Obviously 'well done' meant uncooked in there.

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  Still, I pretended to like it and finished most of it for the sake of the Rev's cowboy sentiments.

  At the end of the meal, which was largely a silent get-it-down-your-neck affair, the Rev asked me, 'Derry here tells me you're having a bit of love trouble?'

  'Nah,' I said, and shot Derry a dirty look.

  'That wasn't why you were moping in your room today, was it?'

  'Nah,' I replied, 'Just a bit tired, you know.'

  'OK, OK. I can see you don't want to talk about it, Wil, but if you ever do, just say so, yeah?' It was then I got the message loud and clear that this whole trip had been some kind of mercy mission for me, that in the Rev's mind you only qualified for time if you were in need of his ministry.

  'Yeah,' I said.

  'Well,' the Rev sighed. 'I've got to make a phone call here, guys, and find out if Mr Hister needs me.'

  'Aw, Pops,' Derry said, 'you mean we're not going to the range?'

  'No, son. I didn't say that. It's just that Mr Hister is dying and he wants me to be there at the end to say a prayer for his soul, that's all. Who knows, the good Lord mightn't be in the mood for Mr Hister's company tonight?'

  As it turned out Mr Hister died and the Rev couldn't take us to the range. Me and Derry were left with our hats on, disappointed by lies of omission again. But it has to be said I didn't mind so much - I was well used to it by then and my mind was otherwise occupied. The shaman in me just couldn't think of anything but Teresa and where she was and when I might see her in the flesh again.

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  i6

  Blood 'n' Thunder 'n' Lightning

  If the shaman in me had been thinking straight - which is impossible because shamans think in spirals not in lines -then I would have known by the timetable of Project events that I would have only had to wait two more days to see Teresa - on the ill-fated Crystal River canoe-ride.

  Once I did look at the timetable, those Family Days just dragged by. And what's more they were two of the hottest days in Milwaukee since records began. I mean, it was stifling hot and steam-room humid. Those were the sort of days that could drive a man or boy mad, even with the air-con on full blast.

  So what'd I do apart from go slowly mad? Well let's see, for the first day all I can remember doing is drinking gallons of Mom Horrowitz's iced tea. That stuff'll really make you need to go to the bog alright.

  And what else? You know, I don't rightly know where that Wednesday went? It's strange that amnesia, but I put it down to the way I'd kind of settled into the z-z-z routine of the Horrowitz family home. I'd become just another member of the family. I was Tiara's and Derry's temporary brother. I was Rev and Mom's second son. Things weren't new round there any more and I wasn't either.

  Truth was, I needed some action to take my mind off Teresa. My mind turned to what I did at home to feel

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  free, to just be me, to knock boredom on the head. You know what I'm on about don't you? Yeah, you do. Like all young boys I terrorised my local neighbourhood.

  See, me and Derry just drank iced teas and pissed away that hot Wednesday but that night was a different matter. We were determined to stay out till way late -not past the Rev's eleven-thirty curfew, so's not to arouse suspicion - but late enough to do certain things: the sort of things I used to do every week back home when I was around ten and frankly, all of a sudden there, pissing my life away in America, missed like hell.

  The good news was that Derry was up for anything I suggested. The bad news was that he had no idea what was entailed in innocent wee terror-games like Thunder 'n' Lightning. I had to explain the concept to him: 'It's like this - you sneak up someone's drive and batter their door like thunder and then, you run away like lightning. Got that?'

  'Yeah,' Derry said. 'But, there's this little problem, Wil.'

  'Really?' I said.

  'That could get us shot.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well, over here everyone's got guns.'

  'So?'

  'So you can shoot a prowler on your own property and the cops'd call that self-defence.'

  'Nothing to worry about,' I said. 'We used to deliberately target the homes of SS RUC officers, and they'd guns to shoot the Provos.'

  Derry seemed impressed. 'No shit?'

  'Honest. It'll just make things more interesting, you'll see.'

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  We were out on our first thunder of the night, half-way up the driveway of this big plush house on Elm Street that Derry said everybody in the neighbourhood thought was haunted - and this security light comes on.

  'I dare you to still do it,' I whispered.

  Derry was no chicken, that's for sure. Remember, this was his first time, and with me right behind him, he went up to that door and battered on it like King Billy-oh.

  The both of us ran back down the drive to a hiding place where we could see who we'd summoned. Only neither of us figured it'd be a demon straight from hell. I mean, this guy spotted us in our hiding place from thirty yards away - in the dark. And then, with a, 'Hey you!' he was sprinting down his drive after us. There was no way I was hanging around to find out what he was going to say. Derry neither. We were off, baring down the sidewalk. Like lightning. Two flashes of fleet fearful feet. The only problem was - when I looked over my shoulder - this demon-guy had more or less eaten up the lead we'd had from our head start and he was still gaining on us, fast. There was no doubt in my mind in that power-sapping instant - we were going to get caught by the demon.

  I guess Derry must have seen it that way too. He was up ahead of me, faster than me, but he knew if I was caught he would be in the shite too. The fear of that must have made him angry, very angry, radioactive angry, because he stopped dead right in front of me and stooped.

  I mean, I nearly ran over him.

  But I had the sense to keep running. 'What are you doing?' I said. 'For fuck's sake, come on'.

  Derry the Hulk was hoking something out of a rockery garden so he probably didn't even hear me. He certainly

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  didn't heed me. Instead, he turned to meet the demon with a rock in his hand.

  'I'll kill you, you little fuck,' yelled the demon, who it has to be said, looked a lot like Robert Englund.

  But the demon was terribly wrong. You don't kill the Hulk even if you're a demon. Nah. The Hulk just picks something up - like Derry did - something like a rock -and throws it right at you - as Derry did - right into the demon's sneering face - into the mouth of hell.

  There was a sound like the crack of doom and the demon fell from his great height. And then, a funny thing happened, something you'd say was straight off the TV. The Hulk stood there and roared down at the fallen demon. Roared and roared.

  'Derry. Come on, Derry!' I said, running back for him.

  The Hulk turned on me, yeah all green and nasty. I can tell you, I was totally taken aback. I expected to be propelled through the air with a roar of fury. But my fears were misplaced, he didn't roar at me. Not that night.

  We got the hell out of that place. We flitted through the shadows until we got back on to the holy grounds of the manse.

  'What are we going to do?' Derry said when we got to the back of the church. Gone was the roaring Hulk. Ol' Derry was shaking. I think he was suffering from
a David Banner-type attack of conscience. 'What am I going to tell them?' he was saying over and over.

  I grabbed a hold of him by the T-shirt and shook him until it ripped at the neck 'Play it cool, Derry,' I said. 'We need an alibi so we'll go inside and hang around your Mom for a while.'

  That freaked him out some more.

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  I slapped him round the gob. 'What's done is done. You're going to have to hack this.' He looked over at the manse, shaking. 'Can you hack it?' 'Yeah.'

  And so we made Mom Horrowitz an unknowing accomplice to assault and battery and trespass and whatever else the cops might have charged us with if they'd ever caught us. They never did though. I don't know what happened to that demon we summoned. I had a few theories at the time, though they tended to revolve around stupid-arsed stuff like that ol' cursings and blessings thing again. But now I know better, I think that the demon's plush home and all was the result of some seven film deal, or other pact with the devil. Or that the demon - OK, I'll say it this once without demonising him, that guy who looked like Robert Englund - had sins he really really needed to keep hidden, or else why didn't he go to the cops? Maybe he actually was a child-molester and killer, like Freddy?

  When we got inside, a tired Mom Horrowitz didn't notice the state her son was in or his ripped shirt. She just upped and made us some hot chocolate and the pair of us, like good little boys, we settled down in front of the TV as ever. She was watching the ABC news while the Rev dozed.

  Now I have to tell you, any news I'd watched in America up until then had been about America but, not long after we'd sat down, there was this bulletin on about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I saw the SS RUC and Loyalists clash in a riot in the Tunnel of Portadown. And the PIRA had let off a bomb somewhere in the Waterside of Londonderry. It brought it all flooding back. I suddenly remembered, it was the

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  Eleventh Night back home. The Hit Squad would be out burning the Pope on the bonfires and letting off illegal fireworks and fighting the Pigs and hurling sparklers at each other and singing anti-Taig songs. Ah Jesus, it was the Eleventh. And where was I? Half-way round the world, lost, a stranger in a stranger land, being chased by demons not of my own making.

  'I'll bet you're glad you're not back there tonight, Wil.'' said Mom Horrowitz, looking at me with pity.

  'You bet. Mom,' I said, trying to fight the homesickness of hatred so hard I didn't tell her where she could stick her pity.

  'You bet. Mom?' she repeated. 'Wil, I do believe you have lost that lovely Irish accent of yours.'

  'Nah,' I said.

  'Well don't,' she told me.

  As if you could get rid of it that easy!

  So now you know how me and Derry got our alibi. The price of innocence in the eyes of the law was high, though. I was the one who paid for it, the demonic crime. Did you know that the word 'demon' predates Christianity - it means 'one who knows' in Greek? Well, I was blessed and cursed to become that knowing one. I had to remember who I was. I had to remember what I had tried to forget. And I had to think about what that meant.

  One waking nightmare of a question summed it up for me. It seemed to rise like a hiss from the smashed mouth of hell: How could a good Prod like me have sunk so low as to fall in love with a Taig who didn't want to know him?

  There was only one answer: I was a Judas.

  Love and the Project had made me Judas H Iscariot!

  There was a big big storm that night. The thunder, it

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  woke me up. Like Metallica I rode the lightning into the Twelfth of July.

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  17

  Judas Twelfth

  Lightning, that cruel light of night or day, illuminates like nothing else on earth. What with all the excitement of America I'd kind of forgotten about Ulster, about who I was. How could I have forgotten so much in so short a time? How could I have become this All-American Judas?

  I think, given perspective, I can answer that. Bar falling in love, it was all the Project's fault. See, its founders, they knew that who you are, who I was, all boils down to where and when you hailed from. Time and place. These are the two determinants, that's what our lives are all about. And they knew that by altering them, by taking me out of my place and time and projecting me into America, they'd alter me.

  See, with Life - and I mean a whole life sentence - in another time and another place you or I could be someone completely different. Well, maybe not completely - but different enough. And you or I would never do the things that you or I did because you or I weren't you or I, that you or I. Either one of us could be a Hollywood movie mogul or a fisherman in Thailand or a lawyer or a banker or a nerd like Helmut working at Microsoft. We wouldn't have to be a terrorist fighting for the freedom of Ulster. We wouldn't have been brought up to be a murderer-in-waiting.

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  Time and place, they're our two fates.

  Modern man, or boy, cannot escape these two weird scientific facts of fate. Your sociological environment acts on your genetic psychological make-up: it reacts right back, and hey presto, fate.

  Want an example? I'll give you an example that's close to home. If your Da beat you up fate gives you two choices. Repeat the cycle of violence against others and revisit it on your children or, turn those violent urges back in on yourself - beat yourself up some more, why don't you? And why don't you? Because it's too hard. So you take it out on others, project it away from yourself.

  That's what the Hulk and me did in the Thunder and Lightning of that fateful Eleventh Night. We took it out on others. And on the Twelfth of July in the morning, when I was lying dozy in bed, he was still a bit jumpy at what he'd done. 'What if the cops come for us?' he said.

  'Then we tell them it was a fight,' I said.

  'A fight?'

  'We were out having a laugh. We did his door. He ran after us like a demon from hell. He tried to tackle me, started to lay into me. You fought him off with a rock. Self-defence.'

  'Self-defence, yeah.'

  'We didn't do anything wrong, Derry,' I said. 'Yeah.'

  'It wasn't our fault.' 'Yeah.'

  'So. We just sit tight, see what happens, OK?' 'Yeah.'

  Eating a bucketful of pretzels for brunch, we scanned the local and international news that Twelfth, Derry and me. Till high noon and beyond, we were flicking through all the stations, looking for a report on the demon. And

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  of course, I was looking for reports on the Twelfth to get over this devilish homesickness that was rising in me.

  There were no reports on the fallen demon; it was as if Freddy'd never existed and therefore no crime had been committed. Which was cool.

  What was even better was that I did get to see a bit of the orange parades on NBC - until Derry interrupted it with a whisper - 'He could be dead, you know?'

  'He's not dead,' I said back.

  'How come you can be so cool about all this, Wil,' Derry asked me.

  'Been there, done that,' I said, focusing in on a shot of the UVF Blood 'n' Thunder Band walking up the Lower Ormeau Road.

  'What do you mean?' he said.

  'Nothing,' I said. I didn't want to blow my cover. I didn't know for certain that Derry would be right up for it; how could I have known for sure?

  'Nothing,' Derry said, impersonating my accent almost perfectly. 'Something you mean?'

  All I could see was the big parade come into Belfast City Centre. Drums banging. Flutes fluting and a-tuting. Banners wafting in the wind. The works. I could feel my body moving and twitching, in step.

  'Are you going to tell me?' Derry said.

  'Tell you what?'

  'Tell me.'

  I saw the big dome of City Hall up ahead, in the distance. (City Hall has for ever been synonymous with the favourite word of all Unionist and Loyalist Ulster: no!)

  'Nah,' I said. 'How do I know you can keep a secret?'

  That was a calculated shut-up question; a boy's-own conversation stopper. I was s
aying to him - until you prove you're loyal I won't trust you. So, like a decent

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  fella, Derry shut his gob and watched the remaining pictures of the parades with me while we were sitting there sweating in the heat.

  'What is this all about?' he said after a while. 'This Twelfth thing?'

  There was only one answer. It was straight from 1690. I started singing The Sash: 'Sure my father wore it in his youth, in the bygone days of yore, and it's on the Twelfth I love to wear. The Sash my father wore . . .'

  Why didn't I tell Derry the whole Twelfth story? You don't just blab out all the things that make you you, even if you know what you're fated to be, do you? You don't just tell someone you're a terrorist, do you?

  Nah. At least, not unless you're a Judas. Not unless you've become a shaman flyer, travelled through time and space, and come to a state of mind that exists beyond these things. What exists beyond these things? The nothing to be scared of. The Void.

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  i8

  The Crystal River

  My experience of the Void back then was slim. Generally I went with the flow like everybody else. I thought what I thought that other people thought, I believed in the pseudo-truths that I thought they believed in. My social programming did what it is supposed to do and stopped me seeing the Void - until Teresa. When Teresa walked away from me that first time on Crawfordsburn Beach she made me feel the absence of any real sense of group belonging. Suddenly I was alone. My being part of some imagined greater whole did not matter. I recognised I was lonely and longing. It was like when we met she'd bored this terrible big hole in me with her eyes, you know?

  That big hole is what I call the Void. You don't have to use my terminology though. It has many other names, names empty enough to strike fear into any man or boy: the Abyss, the Heart of Darkness, the Pit, Hell. You name it for yourself when you feel it, or rather when you feel the lack of it, because it doesn't exist. It is the place you, the individual you, came from. It is the place you will go back to. It is nowhere, the everywhere nowhere.