by David Keenan
bars, fences, divide’t aires,
barbe’t wires,
is a stranger Here, Her-self,
is closes’t to Her, as worde’t
on the battlefiel’t,
brave’t boyes.
*
I was visited by Miracle Baby during the final months of the hunger strike. He died, of a brain haemorrhage, in the streets of the Ardoyne, the same week Bobby Sands was elected as the Right Honourable Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. He came to me that night, in a vision, and he says that he had known, all along, that he had looked into my heart, and read its contents, and that he gave me permission, he reached out and he touched Himself on the head, and he let it be known that it was okay, that I had done what my heart had asked of me, and that now I was moving into a new phase of my life, a new phase that nobody could have predicted but that would require the killing of something inside of me, the erasing of something, deep down, and I knew then, after Miracle Baby had withdrawn his hand from my forehead, his hand from which an extra pinkie grew out of the centre at an angle of ninety degrees (what is love is), that I was capable of my own great sacrifice, though perhaps you will not think so, perhaps you will not think it any sacrifice at all, but from that day forth I can tell you that my relationship changed with the guards and with the speaking of the words, and that I was moved out of my cell and began to enjoy certain benefits, certain indulgences, so that in the wake of the hunger strike and the pointless death of ten young men, ten young men that are now invisible and that achieved nothing but History, I was part of a select group that came to an understanding with the other side and so became aware, for the first time, of the true nature of my powers. I asked you earlier if you could work it out, now can you? Can you guess what my superpower might be?
*
Years later I had access to television, I could watch the news on the TV in my cell, and I told you that I saw Patricia one more time, Tommy’s Patricia, I saw her one more time but not in real life and this was when I was watching the news in 1995 and I hear about the murder of a civil rights lawyer name of Patricia Hodges and it meant nothing to me, but with the collusion of the RUC, Loyalist terrorists had placed a bomb under her car, she had been working for Republican prisoners to ensure that their trials were fair and she had turned the key in the ignition of her car and it had set off a bomb that had been hidden in the undercarriage and she had been blown to smithereens in the driveway of her home as her husband and her daughter had waved from the living room window and the news had cut to an interview with her that had been filmed a few month earlier and that’s when I realised it was Tommy’s Patricia, it was Tommy’s Patricia they had killed and that she had found herself a man, a new man, and that she had dedicated herself to the cause and that ultimately she had given her life for it and I realised that Tommy and I, that me and Tommy and Barney and I, would die for something quite different, that really we were on a different side altogether, but that there was something quite beautiful about it all the same, in the disguises we had kept, in the parts that had been given us, there was something that was justified and complete and fulfilled, and I thought about Tommy’s little girl and about Kathy and Davy and I wondered if any of them were still alive and something told me, a voice through the air, that out there, somewhere, there is a little girl that looks just like him, a little girl come back, in his name, in secret, a little girl spinning slowly on an ice rink, in Central Park, her leg raised, her arms stretched out, a little girl that I will never know and that I knew I was capable of not knowing, because I knew that I was capable of not knowing forever, I knew when Miracle Baby visited me that last time that I was up to it, that when the time came my powers would not let me down, and now, as I prepare to be done with this foul language, with these fucking curse words, which is what I have come to call the English language, this lingo that is only good for a joke or for a song, I’m telling you all this, how it all went down, because I never intend to speak it again, because this will be my final telling, because I am to be freed, I am to be freed for good behaviour and according to an agreement, newly made, an agreement bartered, in part, by the dead, I am to be given a new life, gifted with a new identity, and just like the man who saw his own reflection for the first time in the golden waves that flooded his cell, I started when I realised what I had become and what it had all been for. But don’t ask me to talk about it any further. These are my last words. Because now I can tell you, if you haven’t already guessed, what my true superpower was, my own gift from the gods.
Forgetting.
It is the power of the first and the last man.
But wait till I tell you:
Copyright credits
‘It’s Impossible’
English Lyric by Sid Wayne
Spanish Words and Music by Armando Manzanero
Copyright © 1968 by Universal Music Publishing MGB Edim., S.A. de C.V.
Copyright Renewed
All Rights for the U.S. Administered by Universal Music – MGB Songs
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved
Used by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited
‘Masquerade’
Lyric by Paul Francis Webster
Music by John Jacob Loeb
Copyright © 1932 (Renewed 1960) Webster Music Co./Ahlert Fred Music Corp./BMG Gold Songs
Rondor International Inc./BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved
Used by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited
‘For The Good Times’
Words and Music by Kris Kristofferson
Copyright © 1968 by Universal Music – Careers
Copyright Renewed
Universal Music Publishing MGB Limited
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved
Used by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited
About the Author
David Keenan grew up in Airdrie in the late ’70s and early 1980s. A senior critic for The Wire, he is also the author of two books: England’s Hidden Reverse and This Is Memorial Device, his debut novel, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2017.
Also by the Author
England’s Hidden Reverse
This Is Memorial Device
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© David Keenan, 2019
Cover design by Faber
Cover photograph courtesy of the author
The right of David Keenan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34053–8