Eden Burning (7 page)

“Put a notch in your guitar to remember your first one. You’ll never forget it. You can be proud of yourself,” William quipped.

Peter wiped away the beads of sweat, rolling through his strawberry blonde sideburns.

“I didn’t do anything.”

He breathed heavily. His legs splayed open, the neck of his rugby shirt showed thick curly red hair. He rubbed his right hand over the matted curls, pushing to one side the pint of Guinness in front of him. He scratched a scab on his left hand. Cedric leaned forward and stared into Peter’s eyes.

“Try telling that to the Police. I don’t think it will hold up in
the Crumlin Road Courthouse, do you? You’re the intelligent one in the family after all.”

Peter felt his stomach and throat constricting, his breathing getting shallower, his eyes narrowing. He struggled to get the words out. “You might be in there yourself soon watching the paint flake off the walls.”

“Boys, boys, let’s not start fighting. Let’s stay focused.” William signalled to the barman. “Same again.”

“Not for me.” Peter pushed his almost full pint across the table.

• • •

On the afternoon of the Tuesday 3rd January while Michael McGuckin played bowls in Ardoyne Hall. Tom, Rose and Lily were at home. Lily was painting, Rose was in her bedroom studying and Tom was fixing a leak in the bathroom toilet. He had screwed in a metal tray to catch drips from the cistern and a tube from the tray ran into the back of the basin beside the bath. It was a temporary measure until how he could find out how to fix it properly.

While he adjusted the tubing into the basin, Lily went into the kitchen and poured an inch of turpentine into four clean jam jars. She carried them into the sitting room, placed a fifth empty jar for the paintbrushes on a small table. She touched the brushes with her fingers to see if they were soft. She lifted a wooden palette and pressed a line of Prussian blue, Titan Rose, Cadmium Yellow and Platinum White, Black, Violet Blue. She mixed cadmium yellow with blue to make her favourite turquoise green, adding white to make it shimmer. She placed a postcard of Belfast Harbour at sunset on one side of the table. With the canvas on the easel, she mixed more blue with violet, thinning it with the turpentine. The Lough glistened with the lights from
nearby Whitehouse. It was difficult to distinguish the dark blue water from an almost black sky. Streetlights and house lights twinkled like golden stars, studded into the hills. After Lily had finished mixing the colours, she traced the first line between the hill and the sky and the second line between the disappearing land and the beginning of the Lough. On canvas the land and sky merged. Lily placed her brush back into the turpentine and make circles in the Prussian blue on canvas with her fingers. She was not aware of time passing. There was only now, only the mixing, the movement of her hand without thought, the creation of shadows and light. Without thinking her fingers scooped up and mixed on canvas blue with yellow, red with violet, her breathing relaxed, her gaze intently disappearing into the painting.

“British bastards! Go home!” A clatter of stones hit metal.

Tom shouted down to Lily, “They’re at it again.”

Tom ran downstairs into the hallway and placed the metal bar on its hooks. A handful of rioters gathered at the top of Brompton Park hurling broken pavement at the army lookout post.

“British bastards! Go home!” Within minutes there were more than a hundred rioters outside. Tom walked down the hallway towards the sitting room.

“What’s happening?” Lily looked up from her painting and wiped her fingers on an old towel.

“They’re warming up to riot. We should be in full flow in about fifteen minutes. How are you getting on with the painting?” Tom stood beside Lily as she dabbed yellow into the dark mountains.

“It will have to dry before I can do more. But I have time.”

“When is the exhibition opening?”

“Saturday. I’m quitting now. What do you think?”

“I like it. You don’t need touch it. It’s done. All you need to do is sign it.”

A bus rumbled along the road, stopping outside the front door. Tom shook his head at Lily, “It’s odd that they are still running the buses.”

“Get out!” A voice screamed outside.

“I’ll check.” Tom touched Lily on the shoulder, walked quickly into the hallway and into the parlour. He looked out from behind the white lace curtain. A driver still sitting in the seat fumbled with the catch of the door. Two rioters with guns stood facing him. “Hurry up.”

“It’s stuck.” The driver kept his head down pulling wildly at the catch. It opened.

He raised both arms into the air. In a high pitched voiced squeaked, “Don’t hurt me. Take the money.” He pushed a leather bag into the hands of one of the rioters before jumping from the bus and running down the Crumlin Road. Two rioters jumped from the bus. One lit a cloth and pushed it into the neck of a bottle filled with petrol.

“Stand back.” He threw the petrol bomb through the open door.

“Get back.” He yelled at the approaching wave of rioters. “The petrol tank is going to explode.”

The rioters scattered into Brompton Park like a flock of sheep chased by a mad dog. Tom took a deep breath and ran towards the parlour door, shouting upstairs to Rose. “Rose, get downstairs. There’s a bus outside. The tank is going to go at any minute.”

Rose hadn’t even time to open the bedroom door before the petrol tank exploded, shaking the windows in the parlour but not breaking them. Outside flames danced into a black night sky, sparks shooting into the fading light. The rioters cheered as
reinforcements in the form of six Saracen tanks trundled along the Crumlin Road, the window flaps opened and rubber bullets bounced into the crowd.

A familiar cheer was heard. The soldiers inside the Saracen lowered the metal eyelids, leaving enough room to fire rubber bullets into the crowd. “Poom … poom … poom.”

The rioters cheered, “More. More. More.”

Tom said, “It will have quietened down for Mass. It always does.”

That was the Tom that Lily knew – the Tom who was patient, kind and tender. It was the Tom with big shoulders. The Tom you could always depend upon to take you through the worst of whatever life would throw at you. Tom was born in 1920, nine years before The Great Depression swept across the ocean from America to hit Belfast with the fury of a hurricane. His father was of a stocky build, with bushy red hair, sideburns and a curious sprinkling of small brown freckles, dotted down the bridge of his nose and forming a heavy nucleus around his left eye, giving the impression that he was wearing an eye patch.

Tom father’s feet and legs appeared rooted in the earth, making him walk slowly, as though extracting them one at a time from beneath the earth’s boggy surface. His nickname was Elfie. Tom inherited his red curly hair and freckly face from his father and his height and slim build from his mother. She had long black wavy hair which fell onto her shoulders like a silk scarf, deep brown eyes bulged as her wide mouth opened, screaming at Elfie when he came home drunk on a Friday night. She towered over him, flicking the dishcloth at his bowed head, biting her lower lip, shouting, “You pig. You pig. The children are starving.” On the rare occasion when his father ventured to respond, his mother shouted, “There you go. What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?” Flicking the
dishcloth with increasing fury, catching him this time on the nose or eyelid.

Tom’s mother’s genes may have bobbed on a Spanish Armada galleon blessed by Pope Sixtus V. Setting sail from Lisbon in 1588, the galleons were forced to sail around the north of Scotland towards the craggy coast of Donegal, then south past the towering cliffs of Clare, fighting to continue even further south while repeatedly being driven relentlessly north and east by the Gulf Stream. The ships had lost anchors in an earlier battle so were at the mercy of seventy foot waves. Cavalry horses were dragged from below decks, slithered and struggled on the salty wooden floor before being thrown into the tumultuous seas to lighten the load on board. Ships lurched into the air, balancing for a moment on the crests of gigantic waves before following the horses headlong into the depths of the Atlantic. Some of the ships couldn’t escape the pull and lure of the granite rocks off shore. The bellies of ships pierced by shards of rock. Tom’s DNA maybe struggled lacerated from the rocks, slipping the last few inches into shallow water, from where it was possible to stagger, fall and eventually collapse into the embrace of lugworms nesting in the sodden sand. Breathing air from the space between the worms, spitting and coughing blood and sea water, his lungs vigorously filtering the sweet sense of air, snivelling, almost lifeless, head pressed more deeply into the sand, as though wanting to return to a warm centre that was unmoving and solid. The wind whipping onto his back, forcing him to twist and burrow into the sand – yet making him almost smile at the sweet pain of being alive. He raised his eyes to see in the distance two misty shapes approaching through the driving rain struggling to carry a long plank of wood between them; their cloaks swirling into the air like flapping dragon’s wings. He soon felt the soft touch of a hand against his shoulder,
rolling him onto his back. He looked into the Irishman’s eyes, as though into his father’s, as he was gently hoisted onto a rough wooden stretcher and carried to safety, hidden from the English.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada was one of those decisive moments of destiny, forever changing the course of Irish history. The Protestants believed that God was on their side because it was the winds sent from God that destroyed the Armada and not the English. Even Philip II of Spain, when he heard of the result of the expedition, declared, “I sent the Armada against men, not God’s winds and waves.”

During the days of the Great Depression, Tom’s mother would say, “Tom, go and see if you can find any money someone might have dropped on the pavement. If you find any buy three quarters a pound of cod for dinner. Ask Mr Fishy to skin and bone it.” Tom walked slowly down the Horseshoe bend towards Ardoyne, scouring the pavement for a miracle. As he reached the shops, there lying glittering in the gutter at the side of the road was a sparkling silvery half crown. He picked it up, felt the coldness of it in his hand, ran straight over to Mr Fishy to ask for his cod to be boned and skinned.

Elfie’s father used to sell horses and do a bit of painting and decorating for a living. For a while he also sold coal, driving it around in a cart pulled by one of his horses. The other horses galloped around the field beside the house, cutting up the turf with their sharpened hooves until a buyer could be found for them. Elfie planted potatoes in the turned up soil. He made a carousel of wooden horses, painted with outdoor gloss, mostly cream coloured with ochre manes and titan rose harnesses. He drove around North Belfast charging a halfpenny for a ride, allowing the children to go around only once, playing tinned music as the horses moved up and down. The children laughed, clung on for dear life, crying when it stopped. “Will you not give
them another go?” the mothers asked. Tom’s father sometimes said “Yes”, eyeing the mother up and down to see if she was good looking.

Tom never understood why Elfie spent less time at home after his third child John died in childbirth.

After dinner on Friday evenings when Elfie was home, he asked for “
the chocolate
” to be brought to the table. Pushing the dinner plate to one side, he threw himself back in the chair, his legs splayed to the right and left and slowly peeled back the silvery foil. All six eyes watched him as he popped one, two, three squares into his mouth at once. He closed his eyes as he sucked, letting the chocolate slowly melt without looking even once at the children. Then Elfie found another way of finding pleasure in life. He found himself another woman.

Tom would escape into the field at the back of house after his evening meal and lay in the long grass with cowslips tickling his cheeks. He breathed in the smell of the damp clover, buttercups and dandelions and prayed for his father. He prayed his father would not die and go to hell but that God would change him, make a saint out of him and that when he died, he would go to heaven. Tom thought ‘that’s what we were put on earth for – to become saints – to be Divine instruments – holy flutes allowing God to whistle tunes through us’. It was hard for Tom to imagine his father becoming a saint but his mother gently reminded him, “For God nothing is impossible.”

One evening when Tom came back from daydreaming and praying in the garden, Elfie told him that he was putting his mother into Purdysburn mental hospital.

“She needs help.”

“What do you mean she needs help?”

“She’s not well. There’s nothing that we can do for her on our own.”

Tom worried that maybe his prayers weren’t good enough. Couldn’t God hear him? His mother tried to explain to him that he could pray to God by listening to Him rather than talking to Him. She told him that God knew every thought in his head.

“He knows your thoughts before you know them yourself – even the thoughts you don’t want to know.”

His mother accepted the fact that she had to go to Purdysburn, saying, “God’s ways are not our ways”. Tom didn’t know what that meant. Did it mean that Elfie was right and that his mother needed to go into Purdysburn or did it mean that she was going into Purdysburn like a martyr, helpless to resist Elfie and surrendering to the will of God?

Only the week before, Dickie who worked with Tom asked, “Do you want to see a picture of your father?” A photograph was thrust into Tom’s face, of his father with his arms around another woman with short straight hair cut in a bob, unlike his mother’s long wavy hair. He was dancing with her in the Plaza Ballroom. They were both smiling for the camera. The woman’s left hand caught in his father’s right hand was held close to his shoulder. His father’s cheek pressed against her cheek. They were intimately squashed together like pieces of putty settling into one another. Tom studied the photo as Dickie smirked. Tom handed it back. “You can keep the photo Dickie. Thanks.”

“I have another if you want of him lying face down in the cabbages?”