Where Are We Now?

by Glenn Patterson

  ‘There are hotels too, and they’re building more. Fella I know calls it the Bermuda Shorts Triangle.’ That was Brian. He was quoting Brian, who wasn’t, in fairness, on this occasion, stretching a point all that far.

  The tourists who weren’t already trapped there hopped, in their dozens, off the tour buses that stopped every thirty minutes at the Records Office door. Few if any of them could have had the first idea what a tithe applotment was or suspected that was where their ancestors might be lurking.

  ‘And you?’ He had been biding his time. ‘How are things?’

  Beth picked up the plates – ‘Leave those,’ he said – then set them down again. Gently.

  ‘Things?’ She laughed. Then sighed. ‘Things have gone a bit…’ She searched for the words. Seemed bemused at the paucity of choice. ‘A bit off the rails lately, if I’m being totally honest.’

  ‘How off the rails?’

  ‘You’ll not be mad?’

  He reached for her hand, which eluded him.

  ‘I’m bankrupt.’ She picked up the plates again and walked with them, before he had time to react, into the kitchen.

  He stared, stupefied, at the empty chair a moment, then got up and followed her to the door. ‘What do you mean you’re bankrupt?’

  ‘I mean I didn’t have enough money to pay my debts.’

  He was trying to think if he had actually heard her properly last time they talked, when she had used the word ‘partner’.

  ‘But hold on a minute…’

  She turned from the sink where she had set the plates. ‘What?’

  Her sharpness of movement, and tongue, threw him.

  ‘You never said anything.’ Could he have sounded any more pathetic? ‘I would have helped.’

  Another laugh, shorter even than the last, harsher. ‘I don’t think so, Dad. Not with these debts. Anyway’ – she had reined herself in a bit – ‘it’s done now.’ Just like that. ‘It’s really not as big a deal as you think. You can apply for it online. It only takes about half an hour. Twelve months’ time, I’ll be completely discharged.’

  There were so many questions.

  ‘So that kit bag?’

  So many questions and he chose that? But it was the one she had taken away with her, he was certain of it now.

  ‘Is one of my few remaining worldly possessions and contains pretty much all the rest.’ She dried her hands on a tea towel. Smiled tightly. ‘Could we maybe not talk about this any more tonight?’

  That tone. He had, not forgotten, exactly, just not had cause to remember it or the efforts – he and Tanya working in relay or in tandem – to keep the shutters from coming down completely.

  ‘Why don’t we just leave those dishes? Do them in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’ll make us some tea.’

  They watched TV for a while, ‘in real time,’ Beth said, ‘imagine!’ Nearly every programme had people being voted out, or in, or otherwise measured and weighed against one another.

  These things crept in like the tide, he knew. You could channel hop around it for a while, but eventually, wherever you turned, there was just no escape.

  The news for once was almost a relief.

  The lead story on the local bulletin was the missed deadline in the talks aimed at getting the power-sharing executive back up and running. ‘Oh, wait,’ said Beth, ‘this one is a repeat. Next episode, dancing in the street, ring the church bells, history has been made! Again.’

  ‘Couldn’t see the place far enough,’ was what Tanya had said to him, that night – Beth’s eighteenth birthday – when she announced she intended to leave the moment her A Levels were over, not even hanging about for the results. ‘You could hardly blame her.’

  Tanya herself went a bare month after that. ‘It just feels like the end of a chapter,’ she said. ‘Do you not think?’

  Herbie hadn’t quite got there yet. He always had been slower at reading things. (Nights in bed, his chin on her shoulder as she licked a finger to turn the pages of her magazine. ‘Wait, wait, I’m not finished!’) But he was far enough along to know she wasn’t altogether wrong.

  The weather forecast for tomorrow was pretty decent again. That was what the shrunken-suited man-child standing before the weather map actually said: ‘Another pretty decent day in prospect.’ Like today. The sun coming out as he crossed the Dee Street Bridge, slipping off his jacket.

  He sat forward. ‘Here, do you remember the time we went blackberry picking in the Titanic Quarter?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, it was still the shipyard then, technically. One summer, you were, I don’t know, ten or eleven maybe.’

  She turned around, knees pulled up, cushion to her chest.

  ‘The place was a bit of a wasteland: hadn’t been an actual ship built in years. There were these huge brambles growing out through one of the gates, big old green wrought-iron things.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said, sounding as if she wanted to let herself be convinced.

  ‘And the blackberries… The two of us must have picked half a bucketful between us in about ten minutes.’

  ‘And how were they?’

  ‘Dusty, even after they were washed. Right down between the little’ – he didn’t know the word – ‘polyps… blobs. I think we managed to salvage a handful to throw into an apple pie.’

  ‘Where did we get the apples –’ she thumped her cushion, boom-boom, ‘the gasworks?’

  He nodded: very good. ‘I was just thinking,’ he said, ‘that’s where I was standing today when I got your text.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘There’s a road goes off to the left, which is how I remember the spot, because of course they took down the gates when they started all the big building work. I always wondered how the brambles grew up so quickly, then it occurred to me, maybe they had been there all along, you know, from before the shipyard even, just sort of biding their time… Like, there was a thing on the radio the other week, these geese that come from Canada to a tiny patch of grass somewhere up the Shankill every winter. The people on the street come out and feed them, make sure nobody tries to do anything to them. They reckon they have probably been coming since that whole area was countryside.’

  ‘Welcome to sunny Shankill Road. Imagine how disappointed the young ones are when they see where their parents have brought them… Where’s the water?’

  ‘Shankill Leisure Centre.’

  ‘Chicks go half price.’

  Her eyes drifted back to the TV.

  ‘That’s a lovely thought,’ she said, after a minute. ‘Underground blackberries.’ Another minute. She started to laugh, lowered her voice, bearded it, ‘We haven’t gone away, you know.’

  She stopped, returned from her brief sojourn in Gerry Adams. Herbie looked at her face side on, chin resting on the cushion clutched to her chest. His daughter the bankrupt.

  3

  Geese came and went, but seagulls in Belfast were perpetual. There was one in particular that stood vigil on a bollard across the road from the Records Office: a great black back was the informed opinion, the Vincent Price of seagulls, a single red mark on the lower part of its cruel-looking beak like an indelible drip of blood, and a one-eyed sideways stare that could chill you to the marrow. For the past few weeks it had been even more unnerving and aggressive than usual. Hungry too. There wasn’t a crisp or a crumb dropped within a fifty-yard radius but the seagull swooped down and claimed it. One of the security women had had a sandwich snatched right out of her hand as she prepared to take a bite. (Piri-piri chicken. The seagull swallowed it like it was a fresh-caught herring.) Pete, another of the freelancers, had his baseball cap plucked clean off his head, chewed and hawked back up.

  Gulled.

  Kansas City Royals, the cap was. Even online they were hard to get. It had cost him the best part of thirty quid. In the old days, he told the company that had gathered to marvel and to gag at the regurgitated mess, someone would have come round by now and dealt with that bird.
r />   ‘Wait’ – this was Lydia – ‘you’re not talking like a punishment attack?’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s right, but I mean they done a dog once that was running round our way buck mad, snapping at people, chasing cars up and down the street. The council weren’t doing a thing about it. A child could have been bitten, or some driver could have lost control of his car, ploughed into a whole crowd of pedestrians, the front of somebody’s house, maybe, while they were all sitting watching the TV.’

  ‘Simple civic-mindedness is what you’re saying.’

  Lydia started singing, ‘I’ve seen everything, I’ve seen everything,’ and the forty-somethings among them fell to trying to remember who that was by – not the Housemartins, though it had a Housemartinsy vibe…

  The seagull wasn’t there when Herbie arrived – at the third time of asking that week – the next morning. (Not a sound from behind Beth’s door before he left.) Maybe it had finally taken the hint from all the people doing crucifix arm signs at it and flapped right off.

  The doors of the Records Office had only been open ten minutes, but already a queue had formed in the lobby of tourists waiting for their visitors’ passes. For this, above all else, had some of them travelled several thousand miles, spent months online into the wee small hours of their faraway days fantasising about what they might find. A connection to the United Irishmen and the doomed rebellion in the name of the union of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter was the ultimate in desirability, although any defiance of authority, spiritual or temporal, was a retrofitted feather in a far-off family’s cap.

  One by one they would be made to sit in the chair to the right of the reception desk and told to look into the camera, which to their evident and understandable surprise was housed in a ball attached CCTV-wise to the ceiling. It gave them all the air of people captured – and realising in that instant, shit, that they had been captured – in the act of holding up a filling station.

  A couple at the back of the queue were discussing the poem etched on a bronze panel above the door. ‘I take my stand by the Ulster names/ Each clean hard name like a weathered stone…’

  ‘Seamus Heaney,’ one of them pronounced confidently and the woman with her nodded. Herbie resisted the temptation of saying other local poets were available, not least because, truly, how many could he name from wherever it was (South Africa? Zimbabwe?) they were from?

  Lydia came in a quarter of an hour behind him. She took the seat at the table next to him. Leaned in close.

  ‘Guess what.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That fucking seagull.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s a mammy.’ That would certainly account for the more frenzied than usual feeding of late. ‘I just saw the chick, if you could call it that: not much more than a furry egg on legs, only squawking. And of course the mammy’s looking at it like it’s the pinnacle of Creation. Pete was right, we should have done something while we had the chance. Can’t touch it now.’

  ‘I thought you were all for leaving it be.’

  ‘Yeah, when there was just it.’

  ‘I have a feeling that in order for there to be a chick there had to be more than just it.’

  ‘Even worse. They mate for life, don’t they? That bollard is going to be like a family inheritance, yea, even on to the ninth and tenth generation. We might as well run up the white flag now, lay down our lunches and favourite online purchases.’

  Another fifteen minutes, and Pete came in. ‘Did you hear?’

  ‘I already told him,’ Lydia said.

  ‘I think we should get up a petition.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Titanic Foundation, the Harbour Commissioners.’

  A shortish man in a freshly pressed white shirt had presented himself at the enquiries desk. He turned now as the receptionist pointed out Herbie.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to break this up, but that’s my ten o’clock appointment.’

  Lydia cast an eye over him. ‘A real live nephew of Uncle Sam’s?’

  ‘All the way from Tampa, Florida.’

  ‘Ex army?’

  ‘Major, United States Marine Corps, retired.’

  Lydia turned to Pete. ‘There’s your chance,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he had to deal with worse than a great black back gull in his day.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I still have some principles. Even for that seagull I’ll have no truck with the US military–industrial complex.’

  Herbie had the task – pleasant, he had fancied in advance – of explaining to the major that his own great-to-the-power-of-eight grandfather had in all likelihood come from Florida.

  ‘No, no,’ the major said, ‘he went to Florida.’

  ‘I know, but he came from there too.’ He had the frame lined up and waiting in the microfiche. ‘Look, this is him…’ The tip of Herbie’s middle finger on the screen was nearly as wide as the silvery line of great-eight-granddaddy’s name. ‘St Mary’s Church, parish of Kilmud, paid a tithe of a pound of meal. St Mary’s was the estate church of Florida Manor.’

  He recalled hearing Sean Copeland mention in one of his client consultations a Loyal Florida Infantry Yeomanry, which had been raised in 1798 to suppress the United Irishmen in that part of County Down. This was maybe not the optimum moment to mention that.

  The major took out a pair of rimless glasses from a slender stainless-steel case that looked as though it had seen service in tougher theatres of operation than this, peered, took them off again, stopped just short of replacing them in their case. ‘It says all that there?’

  He sounded suspicious. He sounded as though he thought he might be being short-changed. Florida to Florida. It seemed, rather than delightful coincidence, just way too convenient.

  ‘The manor house is still there, out Killinchy direction,’ Herbie said.

  The major had his glasses back on, leaning into the angled hood of the microfiche reader. ‘Killinchy.’ He sounded a good deal less certain about the Ulster names than the poet.

  ‘Wouldn’t be more than half an hour’s drive.’

  ‘Is that part of the service?’ The major straightened, hitched his belt. Herbie was beginning to wonder whether Marine Corps was cover for other more specialist duties. ‘Or am I going to have to pay you extra?’

  Herbie left the major with the numbers of two local cab companies and a promise that he would only bill up to 10.24, the exact minute when he got up and walked out into the landing to take three very deep breaths and tell himself, really, Herbie, you don’t need any of this.

  He knocked off four of his seven and a half hours collecting documents from the reading room and returning them to their allotted places in the store before calling it a day. The seagull, sure enough, was pacing backwards and forwards in front of its bollard, seemingly torn between wanting to show the chick off and – wings angling out gunslinger-swift from its body – warning passersby not to even think of coming within ten feet of it.

  The chick swayed on its thin legs, grey-brown down buffeted by the breeze coming in low and hard off Belfast Lough, head turning this way and that, black eye working overtime. So, this is the world?

  Squawk!

  *

  The first few days she was with him, Beth barely crossed the front doorstep. When she wasn’t sleeping, from what he could tell, she was sitting on the sofa, motionless but for her thumb on the phone screen, a glass of water with a slice of lemon in it at her feet.

  ‘Why don’t you at least go out into the yard?’ he asked her at last.

  The people before him had kept tortoises, at some distant point in the past, or perhaps – even more distantly – the people before them had. Whichever of them had left it, there was a – ‘run’ couldn’t be the word – ‘crawl’, then, all along the left-hand yard wall. The wood was perished and the wire in the few places where it was still intact entirely rusted. The base was stone effect, contoured to provide entertainment or challenge. A couple
of the deeper depressions had filled with rain, becoming watery tombs for the slaters who had moved in en masse when the tortoises moved out.

  Herbie had put it off and put it off (the slater dead, if you must know, rain-bleached and inverted and resembling nothing so much as lumps of porridge in someone else’s sink) then finally got round to paying someone to come and clear the thing out the weekend after Easter. Where the cage had been he put a bench that Sam had found for him on Gumtree, a bit of trellising facing it to train wisteria and encourage it – at long last – to bloom, in glorious early Seventies purple, which was the problem, apparently. The bloom not the colour.

  ‘Hay fever,’ Beth said, ‘remember?’

  ‘I thought that was all cleared up.’

  She sniffed, drily. ‘It comes and goes.’

  He asked her if there were maybe friends she wanted to catch up with, people from school, or… or (who had she used to chum around with?), you know, wherever. They were welcome to call round, he could take himself off upstairs, no bother.

  ‘I’m fine as I am,’ she said and – a sip from the glass – went back to thumbing her phone.

  They took their meals (and truth be told he was glad of the time alone in the kitchen making them). They watched TV. They said good night and closed their doors.

  The fourth day, he came home to find the house empty and a note on the kitchen countertop. ‘Away into town. I’ll do dinner.’

  She came back an hour and a half later with a bag brimful of leeks and a face on her like thunder.

  ‘You know that big long row of murals at the bottom of the road there?’

  He did indeed. A four-panel – make that ‘-gable’ – justification for an organisation that had spent its ‘war’ years murdering Catholics. ‘Freedom Corner, they call it.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she said. She pulled open the fridge door and began to transfer the leeks from the bag to the salad drawer, pausing every now and then to wag one as she spoke. ‘I just passed a group of tourists taking photos of each other in front of it. Big cheesy smiles, like they were –’ she shook a leek in impotent rage, ‘I don’t know where… Universal’s Islands of Adventure. I mean, have you seen what they have written up there?’