The Ballad of HMS Belfast

by Ciaran Carson

  As the Belfast accent of the tannoy tells us what is happening

  I’m about to quote from Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North —

  Blossoming mushroom: from some unknown tree a leaf has stuck to it —

  When it goes off and we’re thrown out of kilter. My mouth is full

  Of broken glass and quinine as everything reverses South.

  The Mouth

  There was this head had this mouth he kept shooting off. Unfortunately.

  It could have been worse for us than it was for him. Provisionally.

  But since nothing in this world is certain and you don’t know who hears what

  We thought it was time he bit off more than he could chew. Literally.

  By the time he is found there’ll be nothing much left to tell who he was.

  But of course some clever dick from the ‘Forscenic Lab’ reconstructs

  Him, what he used to be — not from his actual teeth, not his fingerprints,

  But from the core — the toothmarks of the first and last bite he’d taken of

  This sour apple. But then we would have told them anyway. Publicity.

  Night Out

  Every Thursday night when we press the brass button on the galvanized wire mesh gate

  A figure appears momentarily at the end of the strip-lit concrete passageway,

  Then disappears. The gate squeaks open, slams shut almost instantly behind us.

  Then through the semi-opaque heavy-duty polythene swing doors they might have taken

  From a hospital. At the bar, we get the once-over once again.

  Seven whiskeys later, the band is launching into Four Green Fields.

  From somewhere out beyond the breeze-block walls we get a broken rhythm

  Of machine-gun fire. A ragged chorus. So the sentence of the night

  Is punctuated through and through by rounds of drink, of bullets, of applause.

  Jawbox

  What looks to us like a crackly newsreel, the picture jumping with flak,

  Was clear as day, once. But that’s taken as read, since this is a ‘quotation’

  In the main text of the film, which begins with someone flicking open

  The glossy pages of a Homes and Gardens kitchen supplement: Sink or Swim, the caption

  Says, The Belfast sink combines old-fashioned charm with tried and tested

  Practicality . . . ‘Why Belfast?’, the character begins to ponder — he puts the accent

  On the fast, as if the name was Irish, which it was (or is); this is how

  His father says it, just as, being from Belfast, he calls the sink a ‘jawbox’.

  At first you think the screen’s gone blank, till you realise the camera

  Has focussed on the sink itself: it has eaten up the whole

  Picture. Then it backtracks, to reveal a ’forties kitchen with a kind of wartime

  Atmosphere: an old bakelite Clydesdale radio glows in the corner, humming

  Over names like Moscow, Hilversum, Berlin. There’s those jugs with blue and white

  Striped bars, which give a premonition of the future (still our past) — filled

  With flowers, they’re déjà vu before their time, just as the sink, retired now

  To the garden, overflows with hyacinths, geraniums.

  There’s something threatening about the kitchen — knives, glass, the epileptic

  Buzzing of the overhead fluorescent strip, the white glaze blotched with calligraphic

  Tea-leaves. Something in the pattern brings to mind an ornamental

  Slightly murderous detail, and the picture changes with a click to show

  The handcuffed metal Xs of an old-style elevator gate. Someone’s going down —

  Chinese shadows flicking off and on across the various floors — to the Forensic Lab.

  It’s like suspicion, this weightless feeling in his stomach; and the clickety-clack

  Reminds him of a railway journey, interrupted, for the seventh time that week,

  By a bomb on the line between Dundalk and Newry. Or Newry and Dundalk, depending

  Where you’re coming from: like the difference between Cambodia and Kampuchea.

  Shepherded on board an Ulsterbus, knowing now that the appointment won’t be kept,

  His attention wanders out across the rushy unkempt landscape, where a white dot

  Concentrates his gaze. He lurches nearer. A hedge, a stone wall, gets in the way,

  And then, brimming with water, wind-skimmed, rippled — he remembers how

  He used to scoop an icy draught from it — the Belfast sink reveals itself.

  It’s now a cattle-trough, ripped out from a deconstructed farmhouse renovated

  In the ‘hacienda’ style — not inappropriately, since South of the Border

  Down Mexico Way is a big hit in these parts. Just then the border passes through him

  Like a knife, invisibly, as the blip of the bus is captured on surveillance radar.

  What’s been stirring in his memory, like tea-leaves stirred in water —

  He’s elbow-deep in it, fingers trying to unblock the plughole — is the half-gnawed

  Apple found at the mise-en-scène. The body, face-down on the steaming

  Freshly-tarmacked road. He bites into the core, imagining his mouth’s interior.

  That twinge, an old occlusion. The tooth he broke on the rim of the jawbox

  When he was eight. Blood-spattered white glaze; dilating, red confetti.

  He spits out the pips and stares at the imaginary pith, seeing himself engraved there:

  Furrows, indentations, grooves, as crisp as fingerprints. A little hinge of skin.

  The mouth suggests the body —

  Biting, grinding, breathing, chewing, spitting, tasting; clenched

  In a grimace or a smile — his child’s body, hunched in the dark alcove underneath

  The sink, sulking, tearful, wishing he was dead. Imprisoned by so many

  Small transgressions, he wants to break out of the trap. He’s caught between

  Belfast and Belfast, in the accordion pleats between two lurching carriages

  Banging, rattling, threatening to break loose, as he gets a terrifying glimpse

  Of railway sleepers, blotchy gravel flicking past a smell of creosote and oil and urine.

  The coupling snaps; another mouth floats into view, its rust-tinged canine edges

  Sealed in labelled see-through polythene; there’s an O of condensation. From the cloud

  A face begins to dawn: something like his own, but thicker, coarser, Jekyll

  Turning into Hyde — an Englishman into an Irishman — emerging from the bloom

  Behind the mirror. Breathed-on, becoming whole, the murderer is hunched

  Behind the hedge. One bite from the apple, as the victim’s Ford Fiesta trickles

  Up the driveway. The car door opens. The apple’s thrown away.

  There’s a breath of fresh tar. The scent will always summon up that afternoon,

  As it blossoms into apple, into mouth. It’s hanging in the air as Dr Jekyll finally

  Makes it into Belfast. Beyond the steamed-up window, the half-dismantled gasworks

  Loom up, like a rusty film noir laboratory — carboys, vats, alembics, coils, retorts.

  It’s that effect where one image warps into the other, like the double helix

  Of the DNA code, his footsteps dogged throughout the action by another. Or

  A split screen might suggest the parallels of past and present, Jekyll ticking

  Downwards in the lift, as Hyde runs down the spiral stairwell. Till they meet.

  What looks to us like a crackly newsreel, the picture jumping with flak,

  Is the spotted, rust-tinged mirror screwed above the Belfast sink. Jekyll’s head

  Is jerking back and forward on the rim. Red confetti spatters the white glaze.

  The camera backtracks to take in a tattered Homes and Gardens kitchen supplement.<
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  A pair of hands — lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor, and thickly shadowed

  With swart hair — come into view, and flick the pages of the magazine.

  Belfast, the voice says, not Belfast. Then the credits roll.

  John Ruskin in Belfast

  As I approached the city, the storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century

  Began to wheel and mass its pendulous decades; the years grew weighty, slate-grey,

  Palpable, muttering with dark caesurae, rolling in a clattering mockery

  Of railway-luggage trains. All this while, the minutes seethed forth as artillery-smoke

  Threatening to collapse into a dank fog. A single gauzy patch of iris blue —

  All that remained of the free azure — contracted, shrank into oblivion

  Till it became all pupil, olive-black, impenetrable; jagged migraine lightning

  Flashed in the dark crock of my brain.

  Like Turner, lashed to the mast of the Ariel, the better to see what he later painted —

  The unwearied rage of memory, no distinction left between the sea and air —

  I am riding out the hurricane, the writhing cloudscape of the sea collapsing

  Into masses of accumulated yeast, which hang in ropes and wreaths from wave to wave;

  Gouts and cataracts of foam pour from the smoky masts of the industrial Armada

  As the wrack resolves itself in skeins and hanks, in terraces and sinks and troughs;

  The air is sick with vitriol, the hospital-sweet scent of snuff, tobacco, linen.

  And the labyrinthine alleyways are bloody with discarded bandages, every kind of ordure:

  The dung of horses, dogs and rats and men; the knitted, knotted streets

  Are crammed with old shoes, ashes, rags, smashed crockery, bullet casings, shreds

  Of nameless clothes, rotten timber jaggy with bent nails, cinders, bones and half-bricks,

  Broken bottles; and kneaded into, trampled, or heaving, fluttering, dancing

  Over all of these, the tattered remnants of the news, every kind of foul advertisement,

  The banner headlines that proclaim an oceanic riot, mutilated politics,

  The seething yeast of anarchy: the very image of a pit, where a chained dwarf

  Savages a chained bulldog.

  As I strove against this lethargy and trance within myself, dismembered

  Fragments of my speech, The Mystery of Life and Its Arts, swam up through the cumulus:

  This strange agony of desire for justice is often, I think, seen in Ireland —

  For being generous-hearted, and intending always to do right, you still neglect

  External laws of right, and therefore you do wrong, without conceiving of it;

  And so fly into wrath when thwarted, and will not admit the possibility of error . . . .

  See how in the static mode of ancient Irish art, the missal-painter draws his angel

  With no sense of failure, as a child might draw an angel, putting red dots

  In the palm of each hand, while the eyes — the eyes are perfect circles, and,

  I regret to say, the mouth is left out altogether.

  That blank mouth, like the memory of a disappointed smile, comes back to haunt me.

  That calm terror, closed against the smog and murk of Belfast: Let it not open

  That it might condemn me. Let it remain inviolate.

  Or let that missing mouth be mine, as, one evening in Siena

  I walked the hills above, where fireflies moved like finely-broken starlight

  Through the purple leaves, rising, falling, as the cobalt clouds — white-edged, mountainous —

  Surged into thunderous night; and fireflies gusted everywhere, mixed with the lightning,

  Till I thought I’d open up my mouth and swallow them, as I might gulp the Milky Way.

  When the last star fades into the absolute azure, I will return

  To where The Dawn of Christianity, by Turner, hangs in Belfast in its gilt frame:

  Airy, half-discovered shades of aqua, the night becoming hazy milk and pearl,

  The canvas is a perfect circle; and as I gaze into its opalescent mirror

  I try to find its subject, The Flight into Egypt. A palm tree beckons

  Like an angel’s hand: words issue from the sealed tomb of his mouth — Be thou there

  Until I bring thee word — and the Holy Family vanishes into the breathed-on mirror

  Where the Nile-blue sky becomes the Nile, abandoning the Empire

  To its Massacre of Innocents, the mutilated hands and knees of children.

  Narrative in Black and White

  Now take these golf balls, scattered all around the place, which since

  The reproduction’s blurred, you’d easily misconstrue as ping-pong —

  You can’t make out the dimples. But they’re different as chalk and cheese:

  Ever get hit by a golf ball? You’d know all about it. And perhaps

  The golf club in the bottom corner is no give-away. People have been known

  To mistake it for a gun. And the disembodied plus-fours

  Might be army surplus. No, all these things are dangerous enough,

  According to whose rules you play. Which is maybe why they’re put there,

  Where you’d least expect them, floating against the façade of the Europa.

  Hotel, that is. You know it? Looks as if it’s taken from a photograph,

  Down to the missing E of the logo, the broken windows, which they only got

  Around to fixing last week. Things drift off like that, or people drift in.

  Like Treacy, who it’s all about, according to the guy who painted it.

  This splash of red here: not blood, but a port-wine stain or strawberry mark

  That Treacy carried all his life, just here, above the wrist-watch. Any time

  You saw him sitting, he would have his right hand over it. Like this.

  Too easily recognised, he didn’t like. This is where the black gloves

  Come in, gripping the revolving foyer doors. Or maybe one of them

  Is raised, like saying Power — to the people, to himself, whatever.

  Billiard balls? Well, maybe. Certainly these random scratches on the canvas

  Suggest the chalk-marks on a green baize, a faded diagram from which

  You’d try to piece together what the action was. Like trying to account

  For Treacy’s movements. Though on the night in question, according to the barman

  In The Beaten Docket, he’d staggered in from some win on the horses,

  Slaps a tenner on the counter, and orders a ‘Blue Angel’. Blue what?

  Says the barman. Angel, Treacy says, Blue Bols, vodka, ice, a drop of sugar.

  Oh, and top it up with whipped cream. I say this just to show the sort

  Of him, like someone who a year or two ago would not have known ‘cocktail’

  From a hen’s arse. You’re sure, the barman says, you wouldn’t like a straw?

  The staircase is important. The zig-zag is like taking one step forward,

  Two steps back. For who would take the stairs up thirteen floors, when

  He could take the lift? The reason why, the power had gone that night.

  So only one way in, and one way out. As sure as meeting your own shadow.

  This, I think, is what the mirror represents. Like, everybody knew about the split,

  And what side Treacy ended up on. Of course, the detail’s lost;

  You have to see it like it is, original. The colours, the dimensions.

  Even the frame, like someone spying through binoculars, is saying something:

  I’m watching you; but you, you can’t see me. Ping-pong. Yin-yang.

  So here is Treacy, at the wrong end of the telescope, diminishing.

  He was seen in this bar, that bar. Like what I’m saying is, that anybody

  Might have fingered him. So the man on the thirteenth floor
sits pat.

  He draws back the curtain. He stares through the kaleidoscope of snow

  And sees what’s coming next. Treacy’s footsteps. Game, set and match.

  They found him in the empty room. The face was blown off. They rolled down

  One black glove. A Rorschach blot. The Red Hand, as he called himself.

  Me? I knew him like a brother. Once. But then our lives grew parallel, if

  Parallel is never meeting. He started dressing up and talking down. What

  He would and wouldn’t do. And people don’t go shooting off their mouths like that.

  Hamlet

  As usual, the clock in The Clock Bar was a good few minutes fast:

  A fiction no one really bothered to maintain, unlike the story

  The comrade on my left was telling, which no one knew for certain truth:

  Back in 1922, a sergeant, I forget his name, was shot outside the National Bank . . . .

  Ah yes, what year was it that they knocked it down? Yet, its memory’s as fresh

  As the inky smell of new pound notes — which interferes with the beer-and-whiskey

  Tang of now, like two dogs meeting in the revolutionary 69 of a long sniff,

  Or cattle jostling shit-stained flanks in the Pound. For pound, as some wag

  Interrupted, was an off-shoot of the Falls, from the Irish, fál, a hedge;

  Hence, any kind of enclosed thing, its twigs and branches commemorated

  By the soldiers’ drab and olive camouflage, as they try to melt

  Into a brick wall; red coats might be better, after all. At any rate,

  This sergeant’s number came up; not a winning one. The bullet had his name on it.

  Though Sergeant X, as we’ll call him, doesn’t really feature in the story:

  The nub of it is, This tin can which was heard that night, trundling down

  From the bank, down Balaclava Street. Which thousands heard, and no one ever

  Saw. Which was heard for years, any night that trouble might be

  Round the corner . . . and when it skittered to a halt, you knew