Paperboy (16 page)

But before this business negotiation could get into full swing, I heard my wee brother shouting out from the kitchen. ‘Quick! Quick! The sausages is all on fire!' he cried alarmingly.

I rushed indoors to the kitchen, and, sure enough, the sausage fat in the grill had ignited. There was smoke everywhere: it looked like the stage on
Top of the Pops
. I feared my jumble sale would turn into a smoke-damage sale, like in the Co-op Superstore! I had learned in chemistry class and on
Blue Peter
not to throw water over a fire in the kitchen, so I bravely lifted the whole grill pan by its hot handle and threw it out the back door into the garden. Sausages rained down on the clover-ridden lawn. For a moment I wondered if this was what it felt like to throw a petrol bomb (except a bomb wouldn't have the sausages of course). The grill pan landed hard, crushing my father's favourite rose bush, so I knew I was in trouble – but at least I hadn't set the house on fire. It was the lesser of two evils.

Acting quickly, I retrieved the least burnt sausages from the ground. I inserted the most heavily carbonised pork through the wire into Snowball's hutch. Interestingly, although Snowball was a particularly obese albino rabbit, he remained steadfastly vegetarian, even when exposed to such high levels of temptation. I then washed the surviving sausages in the sink to clean the soil and grass off and left them on the draining board to dry.

Once the emergency was over, I returned to my neglected customers in the street. By the time I returned to my sales station at the table, however, both Titch McCracken and the red clackers had mysteriously vanished. Later, he steadfastly denied that he had stolen these objects of desire, but the sudden appearance of bruises on his wrist the next day gave him away. As natural justice would have it, a few weeks later, Titch ended up in the Royal with a broken wrist. I was sure it had been the clackers.

By this stage, the marvellous jumble sale was deteriorating into chaos. I had sold very little, lost merchandise to my shoplifting mate and burned my Geordie Best sausages. However, just as I was about to admit defeat and close up shop, a crowd of girls came walking down the street. Linking arms happily, they were chewing gum and singing:

I immediately recognised the gift of a marketing opportunity. I dashed indoors, put Donny Osmond on the stereogram and turned the speakers up full blast. It worked! The girls were enthralled. They stopped at my table in the street, with eyes wide open. They had never heard Donny in the street before.

‘Have you any Rollers, wee lad?' they enquired in unison.

‘All their albums,' I replied triumphantly.

‘Class!' said the leader of the gang, as she twirled a long stretch of chewing gum around her forefinger.

Within seconds, I had made 50 pence from Bay City Rollers requests alone. The girls weren't really too interested in the jumble sale, but they enjoyed the music, and I was sure they would go for the hot dogs.

‘I'm goin' to see the Rollers at the Ulster Hall, so I am,' I said, knowing this would enhance the prospect of further sales.

‘Class!' said the leader of the gang, as she scraped the chewing gum from her forefinger into her mouth with her two front teeth. ‘And are you going to be on the Westy Disco float in the Lord Mayor's Show?' she asked.

‘Yeah, my Ma and Da are organising it,' I replied proudly.

By this stage of the conversation with the millie group, I was feeling quite the lad – until, that is, the next question hit me right between the eyes.

‘Are you seein' Sharon Burgess?' asked one of the smaller girls I had never even met before.

‘Aye!' I replied, blushing.

‘She's only going out with you because she fancies your big brother, ya know,' my interlocutor announced with great authority.

In that instant, everything stopped. This was front-page headline news. For a second my whole world stopped turning. The record-player turntable on the stereogram in the sitting room was still going obstinately around, however. I could only vaguely hear the words of ‘Bye Bye, Baby' in the background. I pretended to ignore the wee millie girl's comment. I said nothing in reply – but I would relive and remember those words for hours and days afterwards. This was worse than having a bad heart – it was having a broken heart.

However, for the present, I had to put my acting skills into practice. Miss Baron would have been very proud of me: I simply pretended nothing had happened, and I offered the gang of girls a hot dog with a Geordie Best sausage. They were delighted, and I took an order for four hot dogs. Fortunately this corresponded exactly with the number of surviving sausages now drying out on the draining board in the kitchen. I had now learned my lesson on leaving store security compromised, so this time I sent my wee brother inside with instructions to carry out the sausages and bread on our faux-brass patterned tray. He eagerly obeyed, and within ten seconds, he re-emerged from the house, bounding up the pathway, clinging on to one ear of his bright-orange space hopper with one hand and carrying the tray of Geordie Best sausages and an Ormo pan loaf with the other.

Unfortunately my wee brother's enthusiasm had resulted in an unnecessary level of acceleration, and, as he sped closer and closer to the jumble-sale table, I realised that another disaster was about to unfold. With the sound of a drum solo from Derek playing in the background, my wee brother crashed into my table, chipping the formica and launching the entire contents of the jumble sale into the road, like an
Apollo
lift-off. To make matters worse, he lost balance completely on impact with the table, and the tray carrying the hot dogs continued on its trajectory into the middle of the road.

Our street was strewn with smashed glass, books, broken records, bread and sausages. It looked like North Street after a bomb in Woolworths. My wee brother had landed right on top of me, knocking me over, so that I ended up horizontal on the pavement on top of half an Ormo pan loaf and a bottle of tomato ketchup. The sauce splattered all over the back of my Harrington jacket. I couldn't believe it. I had only just got rid of the smell of boke from the Larne–Stranraer Ferry from my most favourite article of clothing, and now I would have to splash on even more Brut all over to mask the smell of tomato sauce.

But sure, it didn't matter what I smelt like anymore, I suddenly thought. Sharon Burgess was going to two-time me with my big brother, and he would just love that, while I would be chucked and humiliated. Meanwhile, the gang of millie girls ran away up the street, giggling guiltily as if they were afraid of being blamed for something. Then, I'm afraid my pacifist principles were once again compromised: I kicked my wee brother hard on the shins until he stopped laughing and started crying.

I looked around at the devastation before me. It wasn't fair. I looked across at the bright-orange space hopper now lying still in the middle of the road. Its big, smiley face seemed to be looking straight at me. Petra the dog was standing beside it, wagging her tail, happily eating up all the remaining Geordie Best sausages.

I had tried my best, but on my first amazing fundraising venture, I had just ended up losing money. I would never get my silver badge or get my picture taken with a real English Sir, and no children whatsoever would be saved. The space hopper smiled a huge, mocking smile at me. It wasn't fair. Life wasn't fair, so it wasn't. The world wasn't fair.

Chapter 15
Peace in the Papers

O
ne of the best things about growing up in the Upper Shankill was that you could go ‘up the fields'. This was the end of Belfast, where urban sprawl met threatened countryside. However, for us, up the fields represented much more than just a glimpse of pastoral beauty. It was up the fields that my father had fled as a boy when Hitler bombed Belfast. Thousands camped out in those fields during the Blitz. Then I was told that up the fields would be our escape route too, should the IRA burn us out to get rid of the last Protestants from West Belfast. I imagined choosing which of my James Bond Corgi cars and
Doctor Who
annuals to carry with me the night the IRA would burn our house down. I pictured a wee Catholic boy called Seamus using my paperbag and delivering
The Irish News
and the
RTÉ Guide
the next day.

So ‘up the fields' was a safe haven. But there was adventure and a sense of danger there too. One remaining farm perched above our estate. It was a declining rural remnant of another era. The farmer there resented the runny-nosed children with Belfast accents. No doubt we personified for him the cheek of the encroaching city. It was this farmer's fields that presented so much excitement to us, for there were risks attached to going up the fields. You could be chased by the angry farmer himself, or his incensed bull – which was rumoured to have killed a wee boy once. If you went too far into the fields above the north or the west of the city, then you could be chased by vengeful Celtic supporters coming across the mountain from Ligoniel or New Barnsley. There were no peace walls up the mountain yet, so you never knew how safe you were. Every trip up the fields was an adventure.

In the lower fields, we collected bucketloads of blackberries every year. Our fingers would be stained with a fusion of blackberry juice and blood from thorn pricks. I became an expert blackberry picker. It was like delivering papers, only in reverse: instead of emptying a large canvas bag, you filled up a small plastic bag. After years of practice, I could spot the perfect blackberry, ripe for the picking. If the berry was bulging black, it would burst in your fingers and be lost in a juicy mess – my fingers would be stained black. If a berry was too green, it would be immovable, and its thorns would prick your fingers until they bled. My fingers would be stained red. The perfect ripe blackberry was halfway between the two. After a day of successful blackberry-picking and paper delivery, my fingers would be a healthy hue of dark purple. The mothers of the estate would fill jam jars with their homemade blackberry jam. Up the fields was also the place where we plundered frogspawn and newts from the few remaining mountain streams and introduced them to life in the same jam jars, once we had emptied them for a piece and jam.

Every July, we built the bonfire on the lower field. I would spend hours going round the doors for wood. My customers were most generous. If I had delivered the papers proficiently through the winter months, I would be rewarded with ample flammable material come July. The main donations were small broken crates and sticks and cut-down hydrangea bushes, but the most generous donors gave us whole back doors, broken guiders and old wardrobes. My main bonfire duties, apart from wood collection, were building the ‘boney' and guarding it at night with the older boys.

Building a boney was an intricate task. We spent hours getting the base right, so that it would not collapse as the wood piled up. I have no doubt that we learned more about physics and engineering at the boney than in school. A passing dad would do the occasional safety inspection, and now and again a mum would bring us juice and Jammie Dodgers as we rested from our labours in the sunshine. Rival bonfire gangs in neighbouring streets were a constant threat: if they got through your defences and lit your boney before the Eleventh Night, you would have to endure a whole year of taunts and humiliation. And so guarding duties were very important, and we would build a wee guardhouse in the centre of the bonfire in which to sleep at night. I would get very upset every July because my parents never allowed me to sleep inside the bonfire. How unreasonable of them!

Some summer days I was so distracted by my duties at the boney that I almost forgot about my primary occupation – the papers – unless I heard the distant roar of Oul' Mac's van, or Mrs McDonnell, who got a
Beano
and a
Dandy
for her grandchildren, popped her head through the bushes and asked, ‘Are there no papers the night, love?' Then I would dash to the van, heart beating fast, fearing an imminent disciplinary procedure from Oul' Mac.

I loved the Eleventh Night. You would sometimes get a tip from the Orangemen customers, the ones who always put their flags out. On that night, their faces would seem to light up like a bonfire too. The preparation and the atmosphere up the fields was in fact far more enjoyable than watching marching bands the next day, playing boring old-fashioned music that you never heard on
Top of the Pops
. I used to climb up the fields every Eleventh Night and watch the warm glow of bonfires all over Belfast, when weeks of hard work would go up in glorious smoke in the space of a few hours. I remember the smell of damp wood smoking and foil-covered potatoes baking. There was no underage drinking, and no burning of tyres or Irish tricolours at our ‘boney'. Apparently, it was the ‘dirt down the Road' who did that.

The upper fields of the Black Mountain were more remote and mysterious than those nearest to us. I remember my father returning once from a walk up there with a prehistoric flint arrowhead, like in my school history book. He said there was a ‘something-o-lithic' quarry up there. I imagined a colony of surviving cavemen, hiding out in undiscovered caves above us. Some people also said that's where the UDA had their meetings.

The first day I climbed to the top of the Black Mountain, it was almost as exciting as
Thunderbird 3
taking off from Tracy Island. I was both exhilarated and exhausted. As I hiked up to the higher fields with my cousin Mark, I imagined I was climbing Mount Everest, like Sir Edmund Thingummy. After hours of tramping through ‘cows' clap' and mud, over hawthorn bush and painful bramble and through unfamiliar heather and moss, we arrived at the top.

I was the whole way up the fields for the first time ever! I was thrilled: the views were breathtaking and spectacular. I could see all of Belfast: the dome of the City Hall where old men argued; the Co-op Superstore still smouldering in York Street; the big Samson and Goliath cranes in the shipyard where the good jobs were; the unknown enemy territory of Ardoyne. I could see across Belfast Lough, to where the rich people lived, before you got to the caravan in Millisle, and in the distance I could even see where the Mountains of Mourne swept down to the slot machines, candy floss and ‘kiss-me-quick' hats. From this vantage point, you could see across the peace lines to strange alien places you had never been – like in
Star Tre
k, except that, unlike Captain James T. Kirk, you would never boldly go where no one from your side had gone before.

However, the greatest sight of all from the top of the mountain was the massive Divis television transmitter that gave us the BBC and was on the news regularly for being repaired or bombed. It was famous – a single celebrity tower on the top of Belfast. Soldiers guarded the transmitter, like it was their boney, so you couldn't get too near, but it was still impressive to me to be close to something so powerful. (The BBC was very posh and authoritative, though none of the politicians seemed to like it. Even the newsreaders from Northern Ireland spoke with strange English accents: they pronounced every ‘ing', but didn't pronounce their ‘r's. They would say we were listening to ‘Radio Ulstah', or watching ‘BBC Nawthan Ahland').

There was one day in particular up the fields that I would never forget. It was a spring day, and I was up there with my big brother, collecting dandelion leaves for Snowball, the obese albino rabbit. On the way back down the lower fields, we met Roberta and Mandy, two wee girls from our estate, who were happily taking turns on the rope swing.

Roberta Ross and Mandy Brown were two older girls who lived in the next street and who both still got
Bunty
, even though they were of
Jackie
age. Their street was the one that led you up the fields: it was on a steep hill, so it was hard work to carry bonfire wood up there in the summer, but great fun to slide down on the lid of a biscuit tin in the winter. The rope swing the girls were playing on was slung from the tallest tree in the lowest field. It was far more exciting than the ageing, vandalised playground swings in Woodvale Park. (The park used to have a wonderfully sickening roundabout and a cold steel slide as well, but it all got wrecked in the Troubles.) Meanwhile, up the fields, this magnificent swing was like something from
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
. Made of thick strong rope borrowed by a dad from the shipyard, it had a huge knot at the bottom to sit on. When you fell off the tree swing, you usually ended up in the Royal for stitches.

Roberta's father was a milkman who got up very early in the morning, and Mandy's mother took Keep Fit with plump pensioners in the church hall. Mandy fancied my big brother, so the two wee girls giggled as we approached them at the swing. My big brother provoked a lot of reactions in me, but giggling wasn't one of them. I just couldn't understand girls.

‘Hiya!' said Mandy, swinging happily. Roberta giggled.

‘'Bout ye?' said my big brother. He spat out his Wrigley's in a very manly way.

‘Mandy fancies you!' announced Roberta indiscreetly.

My big brother did not reply directly. Instead, he picked up a small stone and fired it at the bough of the tree, knocking off a small piece of bark. Mandy jumped a little, but looked impressed. Throwing stones was a sign of virility in West Belfast.

Roberta and Mandy weren't cheeky or millies, so I thought they would be easy to impress. I picked up a slightly larger stone and also threw it at the poor, embattled tree. My aim wasn't as good as my big brother's, so I missed the tree, and Mandy had to duck as my stone flew past her head into the field, missing its target by several miles. The two girls giggled again. This giggle had a different tone to the one they had given in response to my big brother, though. He was a genius at aiming footballs, rugby balls, cricket balls and stones. I was only good at aiming newspapers through letterboxes.

As if to consolidate my humiliation, my big brother then picked up a large, impressive piece of cement from the remains of last year's boney. There was still white ash on it, which covered his hands and his Wrangler jacket. Although he now looked like Auntie Mabel after she had been mixing flour to make buns for the soldiers, the girls still looked at him respectfully. No mocking giggles for my big brother. He hurled the lump of cement with both hands, and the projectile ploughed into the bough of the tree and knocked off several small and hopeless green shoots. The rope swing shuddered, and Mandy seemed to shudder too at this display of masculinity. I knew instinctively that it was my turn. Not to be outdone, I looked around the debris of last year's bonfire. There were some rusty springs that were all that remained of the old mattress that Mrs Porter had given us when her husband died, but I realised that these would be too small to make an impact.

‘What's that you've got in your pocket?' asked Mandy, who had suddenly noticed the dandelion leaves falling out of the pockets of my parallels.

‘It's dandelion leaves for our Snowball, so it is,' I replied innocently. The giggling erupted once more.

‘Dandelion leaves make you wet the bed, ya know, wee boy,' taunted Mandy. There then ensued a musical chorus of ‘Wet the bed, wet the bed', and eventually my traitorous big brother joined in: ‘Wet the bed, wet the bed, wet the bed … '

It didn't make sense. How could a weed from up the fields impact on my bladder function while I was in my bed? Maybe I had missed that page in my biology book. Maybe that's what made Snowball pee on his straw so much. I hadn't wet the bed for years, although I had recently spilled some Lucozade on the sheets when I was in bed with the chickenpox. Anyway, now I understood why my big brother wasn't carrying any dandelion leaves in his pockets. He had plucked dozens of leaves, but they had all been stuffed into my pockets. I was clearly intended to be the beast of burden for all potentially embarrassing materials. I was the ass for kicking.

By this stage, I was becoming desperate to save face. I needed a big stone, and I needed one now. I suddenly spied a red brick from last year's bonfire debris. It had been used to hold down the sides of our tent the night before the Eleventh Night, when I had been allowed to sleep beside the boney (rather than inside it). I lifted the heavy half-brick and flung it at the tree. Once again, however, it missed its intended destination, and once again Mandy had to duck. As she fell off the swing into the ashy dust below, the red brick continued on its tragic trajectory and hit poor Roberta Ross on the head. ‘Oh f**k!' said my big brother and disappeared into the distance in an instant, like a summarily sacked paperboy.

Mandy was now lying on the ground, holding her scratched leg and crying. Roberta looked up at me with a trickle of blood on her forehead, and, as she stared at me, the water came to her eyes too. I had red brick on my hands.

I froze on the spot. I had made two wee girls cry. I had made two wee girls bleed! I was in trouble. This was the worst thing I had ever done in my life – worse even than stealing sweetie mice from the youth-club tuck shop when the minister's wife's back was turned to open a new box of Tayto Cheese & Onion. I felt guilt and fear in equal measure. And I was ashamed.

‘You're dead!' shouted Mandy.

I couldn't disagree.

‘Her Da is gonna kill you!' she continued.