‘Hurry up, Tony Spielberg,’ Aaron Ward said impatiently after five takes of Colm eating sausage and chips. ‘I’ve rugby training to go to!’
I informed Aaron that although he thought he was being funny and sarcastic by calling me ‘Tony Spielberg’, Spielberg’s mates probably mocked him and called him ‘Stephen Hitchcock’ when he was in college. I said I would remind him of this incident when the world premier of my first science fiction blockbuster was on in Leicester Square in London, and then he’d be laughing on the other side of his face.
‘You’ll be lucky to direct a crap episode of Doctor Who,’ he taunted, and on hearing this the rest of the gang felt compelled to impersonate Daleks with their knives and forks and shout ‘Exterminate!’
‘How can the Daleks be masters of the universe when they can’t even climb stairs?’ asked Aaron predictably.
Intellectuals always pointed out this particular weakness in the Doctor Who universe.
‘Oh, you think you’ve found my Achilles heel, don’t you, rugger boy? I’ll have you know that some Doctor Who is almost Nietzschean, so it is!’
‘Well if you don’t hurry up and get this over with there’ll be ructions and you won’t have any actors left for your wee fillum,’ answered Aaron.
As a committed pacifist I once again needed to resist the urge to knock Aaron’s lamp in. Instead, I quietly decided that most shots of Aaron would end up on the cutting room floor, and that would harden him. Of course, all of this unnecessary mockery wasted more time, and we had to do yet another take of Colm and his friends eating their sausages and chips the day before a Heather came. The baked beans were getting cold now, which stretched the acting skills of my volunteers because everyone complained that cold beans were disgusting. Even the lovely Lesley complained. I could tell from her uncharacteristic silence that she was not happy.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I barked.
‘Ach, ya know,’ she replied.
‘What?’
‘This isn’t too much craic,’ she finally whooped.
‘Will youse all stop your gurnin’ or I’ll give youse something to gurn about,’ I grunted.
I regretted not asking some of my fellow thespians from the drama society to contribute serious acting to my video production. Hamlet and Ophelia would have consumed cold baked beans with grace and gravitas no matter how many takes it took. They may not have spoken to me, and they still didn’t know my name, but they would certainly not have allowed any hardship as minor as cold baked beans to distract them from their art. Where was a troupe of semi-professional actors when you needed one?
In spite of the tensions on set – which I knew were probably an everyday occurrence for Spielberg too – I eventually had sufficient footage to realise my artistic vision. After many hours of editing to ensure the scenes shifted in line with the narrative of the lyrics and the images changed on the most appropriate electric drumbeat, my latest pop music video was complete. I showed the final edit to Lesley and asked for her critical feedback.
‘Well, is it really, really deep?’ I asked. ‘I want it to be almost Nietzschean.’
‘It’s brilliant, so it is, but my hair wasn’t right in the canteen and my earrings look all wrong,’ she replied.
I brought a copy home but I couldn’t show it on my father’s Betamax video recorder because my video was recorded on VHS. My father insisted that Betamax was better than VHS and my mother said that he was a very clever man, so he was, who knew a thing or two about gadgets. So we borrowed the Westy Disco VHS recorder to debut my video in Belfast.
‘Ach, that’s a lovely wee story, love,’ was my mother’s critique. ‘I can hardly believe my wee son is able to do all that by himself.’
‘Well, it’s really, really, dark and really, really deep as well, ya know, Mammy,’ I explained. ‘It works on many different levels, so it does.’
‘You’re doin’ rightly son,’ my father said warmly, in spite of his disapproval of the VHS tape.
‘Loadacrap,’ said my big brother, laughing heartily. ‘I’m keekin’ myself!’
‘Class!’ my wee brother said finally, before unplugging the video recorder because The A-Team was about to start on UTV.
I was starting to get seriously worried about what lay ahead for me after university. There were no jobs in Belfast. You used to be able to rely on someone you knew in the foundry or the shipyard to get you ‘a start’, but now those days were gone, as Bucks Fizz would say. Every time I travelled from Belfast to Coleraine on the train, I looked out the window of my freezing carriage at the forlorn sight of the abandoned DeLorean Motor factory. The shells of space-age, stainless steel cars languishing in the rain seemed to sum up the Northern Ireland economy. Belfast was like one of these DeLoreans – plenty of potential, but scuppered by selfishness and stupidity. I tended to agree with my granny’s assessment of John DeLorean.
‘That DeLorean fella’s nathin’ but a bad oul rip!’
Belfast was like John DeLorean, seemingly full of promise, but ultimately full of shite.
If I was to get a job in the media I would need to gain some experience and apply for lots of jobs. First I applied to be a presenter on a new music programme called The Tube on Channel 4, but I didn’t even get an interview. In the end they gave the job to yer man who played the piano in Squeeze, and he kept making mistakes! I was certain Jools Holland’s presenting career would be over soon and this might just leave an opening for the likes of me. I applied to do a journalism course at the College of Business Studies in Belfast because that’s where Eamonn Holmes went and he had taken over from Gloria Hunniford presenting Good Evening Ulster on UTV. I also applied to a journalism school in Dublin even though this decision might hasten a united Ireland, and I wrote to BBC Northern Ireland to ask if I could read the news like Rose Neill because she was also very young and attractive like myself. What would be the point of becoming the first person in my family to get a university degree if I couldn’t get a job? If I couldn’t secure employment when I graduated I would have to join the queue in Snugville Street to sign on with all the other unemployed people on the Shankill, and most of them hadn’t even passed their eleven-plus. I often wondered why so few people from the Shankill went to grammar school and university compared to other parts of the city, but nobody else seemed to care. All the politicians cared about was getting re-elected so they could keep us British and make sure the IRA never got their united Ireland. After the IRA tried to kill Margaret Thatcher in the Brighton bomb I was sure Maggie would never allow a united Ireland. The IRA said they ‘only had to be lucky once’ to kill Mrs Thatcher, and Marty Mullen said the bomb was ‘a legitimate act of war against an imperialist force of occupation’. I tried to argue with Marty’s militarism – I explained that for a pacifist there was no such thing as a legitimate act of war, but Marty said I was just being middle class. I asked Marty if he didn’t feel sorry for Norman Tebitt when they were digging him out of the debris of the hotel in his jammies on the news.
‘Wise up, wee lad!’ he replied.
I was sick and tired of all the hatred. I dreamed of a future Northern Ireland free from hatred, where all children could live and learn and play together.
‘Wise up, wee lad!’ I thought to myself.
The possibility of peace seemed more distant than ever. The longer the Troubles went on, the more bitter and divided everyone became. Now that I was educated, I understood that there were many very different and very clever ways to justify killing people to get your way. I had wrongly assumed that when people became more educated they would naturally become pacifists, but I discovered that intellectuals had lots of ingenious vindications for war. I was weary of all the excuses for killing people in Northern Ireland, but as I learned more about conflict in other countries it was reassuring to know that other people killed each other to get their way too. I began to read books about war and peace in the conflict section of the university library near where Marina with the Daisy Duke shorts sat. I
discovered that Jews and Muslims hated each other just as much as Catholics and Protestants did, and Beirut made Belfast look like a Sunday School picnic at Pickie Pool. I learned that sectarianism hadn’t been invented in Belfast. People in other countries also blamed everything on the other side while making excuses for the atrocities of their own side, and killing for the sake of national identity seemed to be a pretty normal part of being a human being. I was soon as fascinated by the subject of conflict resolution as I was by Tina Turner’s thighs on Top of the Pops. If I could get a job as a journalist I could start out reporting on the price of cows in Ballymena or reading warnings about fog on the M2 on a Monday morning, but I could eventually become a courageous war correspondent in a white suit and bullet-proof jacket, shining new light on the inhumanity of war around the world. The media was becoming more and more powerful, and soon audiences would be so appalled by the graphic brutality on their television screens that they would all choose peace over war. This was my vocation. I just needed to persuade someone, somewhere, to give me a wee start. Deep down I was still a dreamer, so I was.
16
FAREWELL TO BIG ISOBEL
Life, the universe and everything were just as complex as in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so they were. I found that late night debates over Yellow Pack coffee in student digs were a good place to increase my understanding of the big issues of life, death, world hunger and the possibility of intergalactic travel. Students proposed very sensible solutions to the world’s problems between midnight and 2 a.m., though after this time the discussions usually deteriorated into stupid arguments or just plain slabbering. Byron Drake knew everything about everything, especially late at night when I suspected he had been smoking marijuana again.
‘No offence, Tone, but I can’t believe that in the twentieth century someone like you could reach the age of twenty and have so little experience of life,’ said Byron, breathing heavily into his Yasser Arafat scarf in an attempt to create some heat in his freezing flat.
‘Twenty one,’ I said, cupping my hands around a tepid CND mug. ‘And you haven’t had sex yet either!’
‘Don’t comment on things you know nothing about, Tone.’
‘Well, I’ve yet to see you even going out with a wee girl. At least I can snog Lesley any day of the week, apart from weekends when I go home to get my washing done.’
‘Listen, Tone. I date women from England, not “wee girls” from Ireland, and what happens in the sack in Essex, stays in Essex,’ Byron said cryptically.
I was confused. Why would anyone want to have sex in a sack? I remembered doing sack races on sports days at school and the sack was always dead itchy on your skin, so it was bound to wreak havoc with your jimmy joe.
‘Okay, then tell me about the last time you had sex,’ I said.
Byron tapped his nose sagely. ‘I know how to please a woman in every conceivable direction.’
I wanted to repeat the words of Duran Duran, ‘Please, please tell me now, is there something I should know?’ but I wasn’t prepared to give Byron the pleasure of knowing he knew more than me, even though he already knew he knew more.
‘Every direction? Like, do you need to use a compass?’
‘Ha, ha. Very droll, Tone, very droll. Let’s just say the women I make love to have no complaints.’
‘Aye, in your dreams, big lad!’ I said, noticing once again how working class I sounded when I had an argument with Byron.
I accepted that I had lived a very sheltered life growing up on the Shankill Road in the 1970s, but I wasn’t as naive as Byron thought. It was true that I had no significant personal experience of sex, but I was certain I would get a chance at some stage in the next decade.
‘Life is not an episode of Doctor-fucking-Who, you know, Tone,’ Byron said, letting his ginger fringe flop over one eye.
I was appalled that anyone would dare to use the F-word when referring to Doctor Who. This was just as bad as the time my big brother said ‘shite’ during one of his increasingly rare appearances at church. He used the offending adjective during a solo of ‘How Great Thou Art’, and while I agreed with his critique of the soprano’s performance, this sort of language was completely unacceptable.
Byron went on to suggest that I needed to listen to The Smith’s latest album because Morrissey had something really, really dark and really, really deep to say to our generation that would awaken me both intellectually and sexually. While he was explaining how Morrissey’s songs were almost Nietzschean, I fell asleep.
Benny and Björn had awakened me to the fact that ‘the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself’ but apart from this it was becoming clear how little I really knew about life. I wasn’t too familiar with death either. Apart from the normal day-to-day deaths of the Troubles, I had very little personal experience of it. Our neighbour, Mr Oliver, had been murdered by cheering gunmen in our street, and apparently I had a twin brother and sister who were stillborn, but I didn’t know them personally so, apart from the nightmares I had about them, these deaths had very little impact on me.
Of course, I had extensive experience of animal death due to my inability to keep alive any of the pets I had purchased to date, but my primary understanding of human death came from the news and the horror movies I saw on TV. These sources provided plenty of good advice on how to avoid death; I learned not to walk past an empty car with its headlights on in Belfast city centre, and I knew that it was unwise to walk across the peace line after dark. I knew that whenever I was stopped by wee hoods and asked if I was a Protestant or a Catholic it was best to answer according to which side I thought they were from, rather than give a truthful and potentially fatal answer. I also understood the dangers of having a shower in a motel room in America and that it was unwise to explore a deserted castle in Transylvania when you’re far from the nearest town and your car has run out of petrol. Furthermore, thanks to the work of Ridley Scott, I was fully aware of the potential dangers lurking on derelict alien spacecraft, especially when you were about to go into stasis. I knew how to avoid death, all right; but I had no idea how to deal with grief. I was as upset as everyone else when Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson and Grace Kelly died in quick succession. I was upset for months after Adric died helping The Doctor to stop a freighter controlled by the Cybermen from crashing into the Planet Earth. However, I had not experienced proper grief until my grandparents started to die.
My father’s father had died when I was too young to remember. Everyone said he was a real gentleman. He’d played cricket for Woodvale Cricket Club and Ireland; my Auntie Hetty still had his international cricket cap in her roof-space and my brothers had both inherited his cricketing genes. My father’s mother was known as Nanny, and she was a proper granny with kisses and presents and nice blue cardigans and false teeth and knitting. When she died everyone was very sad and I had never seen so many adults cry, but Nanny was old and tired and her passing seemed natural. When my Great-auntie Doris with the pearls and proper accent died it was very sad too, but she was even older than Nanny. Everyone said she had been a real lady and very glamorous in her youth but that she had been away with the birds for a few years. On her deathbed she kept repeating a verse from Psalm 23, ‘And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever’, which didn’t sound like being away with the birds to me.
When my mother’s father died it was traumatic for my mother and the whole family. Wee Francey had worked in the bookies for most of his life and loved a wee stout. He retired to be a security man on the door of the local pub, and my mother always worried what would happen to him if the IRA decided to blow up the pub. Granda was also very old and seemed quite fed up, but he died after his bed caught fire while he was having a wee smoke and everyone was just as upset about the way he had gone as the fact that he had gone. I was late for the funeral because I had misjudged how long it would take me to drive to Brown’s Funeral Parlour on the Lisburn Road.
‘You’ll be late for your own bl
oody funeral!’ my mother had said through her tears.
The passing of my first three grandparents was very sad. Waking up and remembering that Nanny and Granda were gone forever was my first taste of grief, and when I saw my parents’ obvious distress I couldn’t help but wonder how I would cope without them when it was their turn in forty years’ time.
‘That’s us movin’ up into the first division now!’ my Uncle Sammy said to my father at Nanny’s funeral.
In many ways Big Isobel was the biggest grandparent in my life, aside from her vast physical proportions. She was the family matriarch, an enormous personality, and an important part of my life for as long as I could remember. My earliest memories were of getting the bus down the Springfield Road to visit her and holding my mother’s hand as we walked up Roden Street, long before they built the Westlink motorway through the middle of it to make a peace line. I must have been only four years old when Granny gave me a shilling to go around to Mrs Adair’s wee sweetie shop for a Lucky Bag and Sherbet Dip. Every time I visited Granny’s house I would check if the tiny toy soldier I had found in my Lucky Bag was still irretrievably stuck between the paving stones in her minuscule front garden. I remembered the days we arrived while Granny was out at the shops buying a nice ham shank for Granda’s dinner. I was amazed when my mother simply reached into the letterbox to find the front door key dangling on a piece of dirty string and let us in. Big Isobel knew everything about me and I knew nearly everything about her, including some of her more intimate medical conditions, which I didn’t want to know about. Granny spoke of mysterious ailments like ‘the change’, ‘trouble with the waterworks’ and ‘problems in the back entry’, and she swore by the healing properties of Valium when you were ‘bad with your nerves’ or ‘your head was turned’.
All Growed Up Page 18