For the Good Times
Page 27
What the fuck just happened? Pat Allardyce says to me. You were supposed to take this cunt alive. I’m sorry, I says to him, I’m sorry. I just fucking lost it there for a minute. He fucking shot me, I says to them, he fucking shot me in the leg. Let’s get the fuck out of here, Pat Allardyce says, and he puts his arm under my shoulder and drags me out, back through this corridor of stinking flesh, out into the street.
You shouldn’t have taken off your bally, he says to me. What the fuck were you thinking? The fucking game’s up, I says to him. The fucking game is up. I don’t even know why I said that then. Just fucking ranting and raving. By this point I was delirious with pain and confusion. What are you talking about? Mad Frank Marby says to me. There’s nothing to worry about. Everybody’s fucking dead. There’s not a sinner left alive to recognise you. But I had been recognised, even though none of us realised it at the time. The dead had recognised one of their own.
*
A gloomy Sunday in December and I had arranged to meet Kathy in Carrickfergus. At the shore in Carrickfergus I sat and I waited and waited. I waited till dreams like my heart were all broken. After two hours I give up and I go to leave but before I go I look around and I look at that wee bench one last time, that wee bench that had waited all its life for the two of us, that view that was kept only for us. I go to leave but then I have a mad thought. I’ve got a chatsby stuck down the band of my trousers and I thought about taking it out and loosing a few bullets into the sea. I thought about shooting the fucking waves dead. I had to laugh. Sure, you’re some man, Xamuel, I says to myself, you’re some fucking man, right enough. It’s not out there, I says to myself, standing there, looking at the wind and the waves, not anymore.
*
See if you like this one:
Pat says to Mick, here Mick, did you see that Christmas is on a Friday this year?
Ah fuck, Mick says to him, let’s just hope it’s not the fucking thirteenth.
*
Christmas in the Ardoyne and we’re all up The Shamrock. The massacre is all over the papers. IRA Scum Slaughter Their Own. Republican Feud Culminates In Bloodbath. Behind the scenes, the bloody gears. But somehow I don’t feel like celebrating.
Barney shouts me a pint of green. Fuck’s wrong with you, he says to me, you’re a secret hero. But all I do is shrug my shoulders like a satisfied snake. Who knew Mad Frank Marby was such a top fucking chanter? Barney says to me, and he nods to the stage. Mad Frank Marby is up there looking like a rapist singing ‘The Way We Were’, with his wife down the front, loving it. Fucking secret heroes, I says to myself. Listen, Barney, I says to him, I’m not feeling it, my friend, I think I’m going to head home. You’re losing it, he says to me, and he shakes his head. We’re going to have to put you out to graze, he says. I’ll phone you a taxi, he says to me, and we walk out to the lobby together, me swinging away on my new crutches.
Jimmy The Grunt’s out there. It’s the 1st of December 1980. The music is coming through all muffled and Jimmy’s selling these Christmas ornaments, these mini Santas, these wee silver angels, and then I spot these decorations, these things on strings that you hang from your tree. Would you take a fucking look at that, Barney, I says to him, it’s fucking plastic bullets. It’s fucking plastic bullets all painted in the colours of Christmas. Are you selling fucking festive plastic bullets, you daft cunt? Barney says to him and he picks a handful up, but Jimmy just grunts. That’s fucking beezer, that is, Barney says, shaking his head. Tommy would have loved that, he says. Then he gives me this big bear hug. God love the Irish, he says to me, and he helps me into my taxi, and I head off, into the night.
*
All the way home I’ve got one of these feelings, one of these feelings of me and Tommy duetting, behind the scenes, and dancing to this silent music, as I sees myself in that bad bastard Danny Whitaker, and I shoots him in the face, and become like the sun.
*
We’re driving through Belfast and it’s so – quiet. It’s so – peaceful. I pictured everybody lying in their beds as we passed the houses in the dark and the roofs coming off, and the walls giving way, and all the glass coffins, stretching off into forever, in the streets of Belfast, is prisoners in Ireland, is poor suffering souls.
I’ll miss the women the most, I says out loud to myself, I don’t know why I says that then. The ladies of my life all dancing through my mind, in the late times, is the answer, I think. How, where is it you’re off to, Xamuel? the driver he says to me, young boy name of Connell, I knew his family. I wish I had made more room for women in my life, I says to him. That’s all I’m saying. This is fucking Belfast, mate, the boy Connell says, there’s a fucking drought on women, he says, which is why we’re all fighting amongst ourselves. If we could get to the end of all this fighting, he says to me, then all of the women would come back. And what a time that will be. All the women, coming back to Ireland; then you’ll see. What, along with all the snakes? I says to him. Aye, that too, he says, that too.
*
The taxi drops me to outside the house. As I hobble to the front door, I drop my keys, and now as I’m trying to bend down to pick them up, there’s a voice, calling, from somewhere in the distance: Xamuel, is that Yourself? it says. Aye, it’s me, I says to this voice, but I’m struggling with my keys. I’m just struggling, I says. I’m just making sure it’s you, says this voice from the air, and it sounds like my old neighbour, Billy McNab. Sure is that yourself, Billy McNab? But there’s no answer. Nobody comes to help, so as I’m left to struggle on my own.
*
I get inside, and I shut the door, I’m exhausted, and I leave my crutches in the hall and start to climb the stair, on my hands and knees, dragging my bad leg behind me. There’s a banging noise, then another, somewhere out the back. Somebody is knocking pans together, bin lids, running from one house till the next. Something is up, the Brits are on their way. I’m halfway up the stair when the glass of the front door is bathed in light. I’m illuminated and half-blinded. I put my hand up to my forehead to shield my eyes and there’s a terrible roaring and a shaking, and the sound of machinery, and the door comes off its hinges and three figures, in masks, come blazing through. I’m dragging myself, backward, up the stair, and the first figure starts to undoing his belt, which is rape, oh Christ Jayzus, he’s going to fucking rape me, is my first thought, but then he wraps his leather belt around his fist and starts walking up the stair toward me, real … slow … like. He’s nearly upon me and I can see his eyes, his Irish eyes, are smiling. He takes his belt and he wraps it tight around my throat. Immobilised, paralysed by these laughing Irish eyes and this bright light, I’m taken like a dog by the neck and dragged down the stair, I can’t breathe, he’s choking me, but I can’t speak neither, and I’m grabbing at my throat, when a dark silhouette appears, a shade that raises its leg and brings it down on my splintered kneecap, which is a relief, to enter me, being, enters me, and it is simple, not complex at all, but is light and simple. The belt around my neck seemed to grow, and to extend, till a noodle or a rope is an umbilical, an umbilical running from Adam’s Apple, to absorb the light that is all around I’s, to take it into our body’s mirror, and to speak it.
As they dragged me toward the Land Rover I broke free and I floated up with my arms raised into the air, God’s Own Boys are the figures rising up, the umbilical to the throat is our bright connection, and the vans, and the ambulances, down below, are humbled, and the military vehicles spread out across Jamaica Street in the snow, are humbled, and the soldiers, are huddled, in groups, their guns aimed at the coffins, arrayed all around them, coffins arrayed, around the ways, and illuminated, by the lights of ambulances, on this borderline, beneath the frosted roofs of the old Ardoyne, gathered, as witnesses, in memory, poor bastards, in memory, now, forever, as I hovered above the rooftops of the Ardoyne and I cast my light down, on the imprisoned, and as the three figures moved to open the Land Rover door, I let myself go, a balloon with the light inside of me is a poor cast f
or a body, as I let go of the golden light inside of me, and let it come down
upon the snowey streets, faye doon,
soft raine, ye pome,
a castes downe aye the pale lighte
upon the peoples
aneath me
as it begins to rain, warm golden tears, raining down, on both sides, as they faced off, as Christmas, of 1980, is long to reign over us, until there was nothing left inside of me, and I crumpled, like a balloon, and I floated back to earth where they hid me in the back of a Land Rover that sped off, in the rain and the snow, because it was still raining, and it was raining forever, I told myself, because I knew what I had started would never stop, because I was aware of being left with one thing, one thing that was inside me, one thing that they could never wipe out themselves, one thing that I realised in that moment was my own to insult and to destroy and to pass through. Then they took me to The Dead Zone: The Place Of Endless Echoes, which is where it all began.
*
I come in during the period where the first hunger strike was coming to an end and the second about to begin, see The Blanketmen what looked like Jayzus, naked, but for a grey or a brown blanket, stood there in their own excrement, young men with the long hair hanging down, brave boys.
I was mirror-searched on my first day, which means being held spread-eagled over a mirror while thick fingers penetrate your orifices. They pulled my hair and kicked me around the room and put their fists in my mouth but when I arrived on my block a shout went up. New man on the block! And the lags around me cheered and clapped and they made me feel less afraid. And I sang what my place was, in Ireland, sang the Ardoyne into the pipes and down into the toilet bowl, and felt Ireland all around us, as an echoes, as an echoes, is everything.
In The Maze you must learn to read an echoes. The jangle of keys, the unlocking of a wing, the approach of a guard, the distant sound of a beating or the cries of a crucifixion above a mirror, is as echoes, now, is as lagging ghosts. At mass there were priests who believed that Christ Jayzus could heal the sick, that we could cast off our crutches and walk into Jayzus Himself, he tells us, one Sunday morning, when he announced that Christ Jayzus was there in The Maze beside us, in the very room where we stood, that He had come down to greet us, and Christ but He must have had a strong stomach because nobody was washing, nobody was cutting their hair, and we’re all stood there, like all of His sons, come back to Him, all of His Christs, stretching back till forever, which is two thousand year since the beginning of the world, says the voice of Christ Jayzus, as a priest, in H3.
Sure is that yourself, one prisoner asked Him, one young man with his hair down to his shoulders and his face eaten by hunger and with black eyes, is that yourself, he says to a space next to the priest, to an invisible presence, and he reaches out, in silence, to touch Himself on the head. This is an old one, lags, Christ Jayzus says to I’s, in the voice of a priest in H3, so stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. Two old muckers, Pat and Mick, are on their holidays in New York, in the USA, in heaven’s blessed eternity, and Pat says to Mick, all in the voice of Christ Jayzus who is risen up like the moon on the wall of a chapel in the H Block, the sun blaring out of the heavens and Pat and Mick hold their hands up to the sun, as in The Maze we lived in the time of The Bible and were visited by pestilence and plague, by maggots that seemed to crawl out ( ) from through the walls, as if The Maze itself was the rotting, suffering word-made-flesh, do you think that’s the same sun we saw in the Ardoyne, Pat says to Mick, the same sun sat up there in the sky throughout the whole shooting match, and Mick says, sure I’ve no idea, Pat, let’s ask someone, and the first person they meet is speaking the word that is the redeemer of the blind pain at the centre of the world, and Mick says to him, excuse me but you wouldn’t happen to know whether that sun up there is the same sun we saw in the Ardoyne all those years ago, which is the voice of Christ Jayzus and he says, sorry, lags, as we ran the gamut of the guards on the way back from mass, which was when we took a beating, every Sunday, when even Christ Jayzus Himself was unprepared to follow us out of the chapel and along the endless corridors and into the empty cells where they would hold I’s up by the arms and legs and they would kick I’s and punch I’s and tear at I’s bodies, sorry, lags, but I wouldn’t know if that’s the same sun you saw in the Ardoyne, is the voice of Christ Jayzus, you see, he says, I’m a stranger here myself, and he takes his hand from the cross and he wipes a single tear from his pale white cheek and in his palm there is a hole in his hand, there is a delicate little labia in the hands of the suffering Christ and he says to I’s, listen, lags, Christ Jayzus says to I’s, don’t give way to wonder, I will pick out your eyes you bastards, in H3, in The Maze, is the sacred heart, closer, brave boys, to the battlefield, and enters History, as a word.
*
The second hunger strike begins in March. I speak to somebody in the cell across from me that had received a comm, a small roll of paper with tiny letters on it that he had secreted inside the eye of his penis and that he had recovered using the graphite shaft of a pencil, saying that Bobby Sands was to lead it and that he fully expected to die. You are talking to a dead man, Sands says, as his fellow prisoners greeted him at mass that Sunday.
We followed the story of the strike with these serial comms, with gossip shouted from cell to cell, with the echoes in the pipes of the place names and the tiny microscopic scripts secreted inside our own bodies. Bobby is coming and going, they says to us, Bobby is leading the lagging.
The no-wash protest comes to an end. The prisoners shaved their heads and their beards. They used soap, carbolic soap that smelt like home but that stung their eyes and matted in their hair.
There were other stories too. The prisoners of The Dead Zone would rewrite books on sheets of toilet paper or adapt books from memory and then read them out the door to the other cells at night. Interminable books, dreadful books filled with terrible words, words like Firepower In Angola and Revolutionary Suicide, so as everything became confused and the comms talked to the books and the books to the toilet paper and the toilet paper to the pipes and the pipes to the songs The Boys would sing, songs by Bobby Sands and Irish folk songs and Victory to the IRA and Victory to the Blanketmen and pop music and punk rock too, until it felt like an echoes of an echoes of an echoes.
That’s when I began to learn the lingo that I intend to speak for the rest of my life. The Irish lingo that I have come to associate with the camaraderie of The Maze and with the breaking of the echoes, and the story, best of all, of a hunger striker who had been part of the first protest and who says that he had forgotten what he looked like entirely, that he had literally no memory of his own face until one day as the sun came blaring through the window of his prison cell a warder was sweeping all of the pish that had run out of his cell, all of the pish that had flooded beneath the door and out into the corridor, this warder had swept it back in, and it came in like the tide, washing up around the edge of his mattress, and he has leaned over and caught his own reflection in this glistening wave, lit up by the sun, in these waters of pale gold, and his own face had emerged as that of a stranger’s, and he saw himself, as if for the first time, as if he had woken up and been given a new identity entirely, that’s me, he says to himself, and he reaches out and he makes his eyes dilate, sets two whirlpools in his eyes with the tips of his fingers, and says that he felt himself hypnotised and that he realised that he had come back to himself, from somewhere that had no name, but that it was there, on the pish-soaked floor, of this shit-smeared cell, where he had come face to face with his real self for the first time and it had given him an inner strength that he never knew before, he had come to himself and given himself permission to be a hero, the king’t ship of the self, he had said, that’s what the comm had read, smuggled in the eye of a penis, boys, I, have, been, given’t, the, king’t, ship, of, myself, and wrote like that too, so as that it most resembled a drunken boat, a royal ship, tossed and raised up over a sea of
pish drops, raining down, this river’s made me go where I wanted, this final crossing, to a dirty mattress, in a shallow pool, from sea to final sea, is the same place, only Belfast, is the centre of the world, only Ireland, is a garden, in space, and as they died, I tracked them, I imagined their real bodies, their final bodies, these first and last men, spoken, out of Adam’s Apple, snaking up, into the air, and all of the leaving, above The Maze, is a trapdoor, hidden above these letters, these English letters, written into the earth, into the page, into the soft, suffering flesh, of this page, above them, is a gap, and I picture that same, soft, warm rain, that final torrent of sorrowful drops, raining down, is all that’s left, on Ireland, tears of pity, tears of heartbreak and shame, for the friends and families, left there, down below, tears of sorrow for God’s Own Boys and their lovers, and a shower of pish for the rest of the bastards.
But unlike me, the world let them go. Unlike me, their time was at an end, and the umbilical gave way, and they passed over, to a place where they refuse to remember.
*
Tell me if’n youse know this one, sonne’t:
The Dead Zone: The Place Of Endless Echoes is written’t
in lingo, on the face of the
eartH:_aitch
is the invisible’t letter of the
English’t alpHa-betical
as Hierophanet sHe is voiceless, as Heth she is: