Though often you take one step forward, two steps back. For if time is a road,
It’s fraught with ramps and dog-legs, switchbacks and spaghetti; here and there,
The dual carriageway becomes a one-track, backward mind. And bits of the landscape
Keep recurring: it seems as if I’ve watched the same suburban tennis match
For hours, and heard, at ever less-surprising intervals, the applause of pigeons
Bursting from a loft. Or the issue is not yet decided, as the desultory handclaps
Turn to rain. The window that my nose is pressed against is breathed-on, giving
Everything a sfumato air. I keep drawing faces on it, or practising my signature.
And if time is a road, then you’re checked again and again
By a mobile checkpoint. One soldier holds a gun to your head. Another soldier
Asks you questions, and another checks the information on the head computer.
Your name. Your brothers’ names. Your father’s name. His occupation. As if
The one they’re looking for is not you, but it might be you. Looks like you
Or smells like you. And suddenly, the posthumous aroma of an empty canvas
Postman’s sack — twine, ink, dead letters — wafts out from the soldiers’
Sodden khaki. It’s obvious they’re bored: one of them is watching Wimbledon
On one of those postage-stamp-sized TV screens. Of course, the proper shot,
An unseen talking head intones, should have been the lob. He’s using words like
Angled, volley, smash and strategy. Someone is fighting a losing battle.
Isn’t that the way, that someone tells you what you should have done, when
You’ve just done the opposite? Did you give the orders for this man’s death?
On the contrary, the accused replies, as if he’d ordered birth or resurrection.
Though one nail drives out another, as my father says.
And my father should have known better than to tamper with Her Majesty’s
Royal Mail — or was it His, then? His humour was to take an Irish ha’penny
With the harp on the flip side, and frank a letter with it. Some people didn’t
See the joke; they’d always thought him a Republican. He was reported,
Laid off for a month. Which is why he never got promoted. So one story goes.
The other is a war-time one, where he’s supposed to go to England
For a training course, but doesn’t, seeing he doesn’t want to get conscripted.
My mother’s version is, he lacked ambition. He was too content to stay
In one place. He liked things as they were . . . perfect touch, perfect timing, perfect
Accuracy: the commentary has just nudged me back a little, as I manage
To take in the action replay. There’s a tiny puff of chalk, as the ball skids off
The line, like someone might be firing in slow motion, far away: that otherwise
Unnoticeable faint cloud on the summer blue, which makes the sky around it
All the more intense and fragile.
It’s nearer to a winter blue. A zig-zag track of footsteps is imprinted
On the frosted tennis-court: it looks as if the Disappeared One rose before
First light, and stalked from one side of the wire cage to the other, off
Into the glinting laurels. No armed wing has yet proclaimed responsibility:
One hand washes the other, says my father, as sure as one funeral makes many.
For the present is a tit-for-tat campaign, exchanging now for then,
The Christmas post of Christmas Past, the black armband of the temporary man;
The insignia have mourned already for this casual preserve. Threading
Through the early morning suburbs and the monkey-puzzle trees, a smell of coffee lingers,
Imprisoned in the air like wisps of orange peel in marmalade; and sleigh-bell music
Tinkles on the radio, like ice cubes in a summer drink. I think I’m starting, now,
To know the street map with my feet, just like my father.
God never shuts one door, said my father, but he opens up another; and then,
I walked the iron catwalk naked in the freezing cold: he’s back into his time
As internee, the humiliation of the weekly bath. It was seven weeks before
He was released: it was his younger brother they were after all the time.
God never opens one door, but he shuts another: my uncle was inside for seven years.
At his funeral, they said how much I looked like him: I’ve got his smoker’s cough,
At any rate. And now my father’s told to cut down on the cigarettes, he smokes
Them three or four puffs at a time. Stubs them out and lights them, seven times.
I found him yesterday a hundred yards ahead of me, struggling, as the blazing
Summer hauled him one step at a time into a freezing furnace. And with each step
He aged. As I closed in on him, he coughed. I coughed. He stopped and turned,
Made two steps back towards me, and I took one step forward.
Queen’s Gambit
A Remote Handling Equipment (Tracked) Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit — Wheelbarrow,
For short — is whirring and ticking towards the Ford Sierrra parked in Tomb Street,
Its robotic arm extended indirectly towards this close-up of a soldier. He’s wearing
An M69 flak jacket, Dr Marten boots and non-regulation skiing gloves.
Another soldier, armed with Self-loading Rifle, squats beneath a spray-gunned
Flourish of graffiti: The Provos Are Fighting For You. Remember It. Brits Out.
Now they’re seen together leaning against the façade of a chemist’s shop,
Admiring — so it would appear — the cardboard ad for Wilkinson Sword razor blades.
So much, they’re now in the interior: a gauzy, pinkish smell of soap and sticking-
Plaster, through which they spit word-bubbles at the white-coated girl assistant.
Much of this is unintelligible, blotted out by stars and asterisks
Just as the street outside is splattered with bits of corrugated iron and confetti.
Her slightly antiseptic perfume is a reminiscent je-ne-sais-quoi
Glimpsed through Pear’s Soap, an orange-sepia zest of coal-tar —
It’s that moiré light from the bathroom window, or a body seen behind
The shower-curtain, holding a Champagne telephone — the colour, not the drink,
Though it gives off a perceptible hiss. And the continuous background
Rumble is a string of Ms and Rs, expanding and contracting
To reveal the windswept starry night, through which a helicopter trawls
Its searchlight. Out there, on the ground, there’s a spoor of Army boots;
Dogs are following their noses, and terrorists are contemplating
Terror, a glittering, tilted view of mercury, while the assistant slithers
Into something more comfortable: jeans, a combat jacket, Doc Martens boots;
Then weighs the confidential dumb-bell of the telephone. She pushes buttons:
Zero Eight Double Zero. Then the number of the Beast, the number of the Beast
Turned upside-down: Six Six Six, Nine Nine Nine . . .
The ambient light of yesterday is amplified by talk of might-have-beens,
Making 69 — the year — look like quotation marks, commentators commentating on
The flash-point of the current Trouble, though there’s any God’s amount
Of Nines and Sixes: 1916, 1690, The Nine Hundred Years’ War, whatever.
Or maybe we can go back to the Year Dot, the nebulous expanding brain-wave
Of the Big Bang, releasing us and It and everything into oblivion;
It’s so hard to remember, and so easy to forget the casualty list —
Like t
he names on a school desk, carved into one another till they’re indecipherable.
It’s that frottage effect again: the paper that you’re scribbling on is grained
And blackened, till the pencil-lead snaps off, in a valley of the broken alphabet
And the streets are a bad photostat grey: the ink comes off on your hand.
With so many foldings and unfoldings, whole segments of the map have fallen off.
It’s not unlike the missing reel in the film, the blank screen jittering
With numerals and flak, till the picture jumps back — a bit out of sync,
As soldiers A and B and others of the lettered regiment discuss the mission
In their disembodied voices. Only the crackly Pye Pocketfone sounds real,
A bee-in-the-biscuit-tin buzzing number codes and decibels. They’re in the belly
Of a Saracen called ‘Felix’, the cartoon cat they’ve taken as a mascot:
It’s all the go, here, changing something into something else, like rhyming
Kampuchea with Cambodia. It’s why Mickey Mouse wears those little white gloves —
Claws are too much like a mouse. And if the animals are trying to be people,
Vice versa is the case as well. Take ‘Mad Dog’ Reilly, for example, who
This instant is proceeding to the rendezvous. A gunman, he isn’t yet; the rod
Is stashed elsewhere, somewhere in a mental block of dog-leg turns and cul-de-sacs.
He sniffs his hand, an antiseptic tang that momentarily brings back
The creak of a starched coat crushed against his double-breasted gaberdine.
After the recorded message, the bleep announces a magnetic silence
Towards which she’s drawn as conspirator, as towards a confessional, whispering
What she knows into the wire-grilled darkness: names, dates, places;
More especially, a future venue, Tomb Street GPO.
She wants the slate wiped clean, Flash or Ajax cutting a bright swathe
Through a murky kitchen floor, transforming it into a gleaming checkerboard.
Tiles of black and white on which the regiments of pawns move ponderously,
Bishops take diagonals, and the Queen sees dazzling lines of power.
Or, putting it another way, Operation ‘Mad Dog’, as it’s known now,
Is the sketch that’s taking shape on the Army HQ blackboard, chalky ghosts
Behind the present, showing what was contemplated and rubbed out, Plan A
Becoming X or Y; interlocked, curved arrows of the mortgaged future.
The raffia waste-paper bin is full of crumpled drafts and cigarette butts,
And ash has seeped through to the carpet. There’s a smell of peeled oranges.
But the Unknown Factor, somewhat like the Unknown Soldier, has yet to take
The witness box. As someone spills a cup of tea on a discarded Irish News
A minor item bleeds through from another page, blurring the main story.
It’s difficult to pick up without the whole thing coming apart in your hands,
But basically it invokes this bunch of cowboys, who, unbeknownst to us all,
Have jumped on board a Ford Sierra, bound for You-Know-Where.
They’re Ordinary Criminals: you know them by the dollar signs that shiver
In their eyes, a notion that they’re going to hit the jackpot of the GPO.
Unbeknownst to themselves, they’ll be picked up in the amplified light
Of a Telescope Starlight II Night Observation Device (NOD) — Noddy, for short,
But not before the stoolie-pigeon spool is reeled back; amplified,
Its querulous troughs and peaks map out a different curve of probability.
My newly-lowered ears in the barber’s mirror were starting to take on a furtive look.
A prison cut — my face seemed Born Again — but then, I’d asked for short.
And I’ve this problem, talking to a man whose mouth is a reflection.
I tend to think the words will come out backwards, so I’m saying nothing.
And then, says he — he’s staring straight into my eyes, the scissors poised —
It seems they think they’re just about to nail your man O’Reilly
When a bunch of hoods pulls up in a Ford Sierra and jumps out with the sawn-off
Shotguns, plastic masks they must have got in Elliot’s — Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck
And Pluto — too much watching TV, if you ask me — so of course the Brits let go
With everything. He snips at my right ear. But now hear this:
This Post Office van bombs out from Tomb Street loading bay, its side door open
And they’ve got this effing Gatling gun or something going full blast —
Dot, dot, dot, dot — and the Brits are all shot up — could you move your head a bit —
Right — so the Mad Dog, he jumps in the back and him and the boys are off like a shot.
So what do you think? It looks to me, it was a set-up job, though who exactly
Was set up, God only knows. You can see it for yourself — they’ve been checking out
That Ford Sierra for the past two hours, just as soon as it was light.
Seems they think the Disney characters were in on it. If you ask me,
With these confidential telephones, you never know who’s doing who, or why.
Better to keep your mouth shut, that’s what I say. Haircut OK, sir?
He held a mirror to my neck. I nodded. He shook out the cloth, and curls
And snippets writhed like commas on the chessboard tiles. Now that I could see
Myself without the hair and beard, I looked like someone else. He brushed
My shoulders, and I left him to a row of empty mirrors, sweeping up
The fallen swathes. Turning into Tomb Street, I began to feel a new man.
Perfume breathed from somewhere, opening avenues of love, or something déjà vu.
Last Orders
Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but
It’s someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens. Like electronic
Russian roulette, since you never know for sure who’s who, or what
You’re walking into. I, for instance, could be anybody. Though I’m told
Taig’s written on my face. See me, would I trust appearances?
Inside a sudden lull. The barman lolls his head at us. We order Harp —
Seems safe enough, everybody drinks it. As someone looks daggers at us
From the Bushmills mirror, a penny drops: how simple it would be for someone
Like ourselves to walk in and blow the whole place, and ourselves, to Kingdom Come.
Hairline Crack
It could have been or might have been. Everything Provisional and Sticky,
Daily splits and splinters at the drop of a hat or a principle —
The right hand wouldn’t even know it was the right hand; some would claim it
As the left. If only this, if only that, if only pigs could fly.
Someone decides, hawk or dove. Ambushes are sprung. Velvet fist. Iron glove.
It was on the stroke of midnight by the luminous dial of the clock
When this woman, caught in crossfire, stooped for the dashboard cigarette lighter.
In that instant, a bullet neatly parted her permanent wave. So now
She tells the story, how a cigarette made all the odds. Between life. And death.
Bloody Hand
Your man, says the Man, will walk into the bar like this — here his fingers
Mimic a pair of legs, one stiff at the knee — so you’ll know exactly
What to do. He sticks a finger to his head. Pretend it’s child’s play —
The hand might be a horse’s mouth, a rabbit or a dog. Five handclaps.
Walls have ears: the shadows you throw are the shadows you try to throw off.
I snuffed out the can
dle between finger and thumb. Was it the left hand
Hacked off at the wrist and thrown to the shores of Ulster? Did Ulster
Exist? Or the Right Hand of God, saying Stop to this and No to that?
My thumb is the hammer of a gun. The thumb goes up. The thumb goes down.
Jump Leads
As the eggbeater spy in the sky flickered overhead, the TV developed a facial tic
Or as it turned out, the protesters had handcuffed themselves to the studio lights.
Muffled off-camera, shouts of No. As I tried to lip-read the talking head
An arms cache came up, magazines laid out like a tray of wedding rings.
The bomb-disposal expert whose face was in shadow for security reasons
Had started very young by taking a torch apart at Christmas to see what made it tick.
Everything went dark. The killers escaped in a red Fiesta according to sources.
Talking, said the Bishop, is better than killing. Just before the Weather
The victim is his wedding photograph. He’s been spattered with confetti.
Yes
I’m drinking in the 7-Up bottle-green eyes of the barmaid
On the Enterprise express — bottles and glasses clinking each other —
When the train slows with a noise like Schweppes and halts just outside Dundalk.
Not that unwontedly, since we’re no strangers to the border bomb.
The Ballad of HMS Belfast Page 4