Paperboy (17 page)

Not if my Da kills me first
, I thought.

What had happened to me? I had turned from rabbit nurturer to terrorist in seconds!

Roberta just looked at me pitifully and cried, until the blood and tears blended on her cheeks. She didn't shout or scream or call me a ‘cheeky wee bastard' or anything – and that just made it worse.

What am I going to do?
I thought. I had to consider the right course of action. Roberta's da was a milkman, so he was probably a hard man because milkmen were legitimate targets. But it was the afternoon, so he was probably in bed right now … Having evaluated all of my options, I took a moral decision. I ran away.

I didn't set foot in that wee girl's street for two years after this, in case her da got me. I had to find an alternative route to the July bonfire through Mr Beattie's hedge, and I missed a whole winter season of street-sliding on my biscuit-tin lid. I had a recurring nightmare of Roberta's da coming to our front door with an angry face, shaking a milk bottle in my face and threatening to split my head like his wee girl's. But it never came to pass. Any hope, however, of a career progression from paperboy to milk boy was shattered.

Interestingly, my big brother displayed great loyalty, by not revealing any of the details of the assault to my parents, so I got off with it. I felt guilty though. I still feel guilty. But somehow I learned something that day up the fields. The bloodied face of Roberta Ross was unforgettable. I worked out that I didn't want to do anything like that ever again. Sure, there were enough people drawing blood in Belfast, and too many of them seemed to enjoy it. So I chose a different path – the path of the pacifist paperboy. It all happened up the fields. The same fields where I watched peace from a distance, in 1976.

It was 28 August, and there had been no big stories or elections for a while, just the usual marches and murders. While the papers were usually a bit lighter in the summer, on this day there were shoulder-breaking extra pages. Oul' Mac had arrived late with the delivery because the crowds were still causing a traffic jam on the Shankill Road. Although he was shouting and saying ‘f**k' even more than usual, there was no danger of Oul' Mac's van being hijacked today. For this was the day that the Catholic women of the Falls Road would walk across the Peace Line and when the Protestant women of the Shankill Road would join them to walk together for peace. This was unheard of.

I first stumbled upon the suggestion that this miracle might actually happen on a recent front page of one of my
Belly Tellys
. I was so shocked when I read this news that I stopped still on the pavement mid-delivery and my paperbag dropped off my shoulder, landing perilously close to a recent dirty deposit made by Petra, our street's now legendary labrador.

I wasn't used to miracles. Protestants and Catholics didn't mix deliberately, unless they were rioting at the Peace Line, or arguing on
Scene Around Six
; unless there were petrol bombs or politicians present. We weren't allowed to live in the same street; we weren't allowed to go to school together; we weren't allowed to get married; and we even got blown up in different pubs. And, after that, we would be buried in different graveyards. My granda's family were buried in an old cemetery that was divided between the two sides: when I went to visit my dead relatives, I noticed there were no Virgin Marys on our side of the cemetery. I wondered if the corpses were building peace walls underground, but I was pretty sure that wouldn't matter quite so much down there.

Of course, sometimes Catholics and Protestants couldn't avoid ending up in the same place together – like when all the kids from the Falls and the Shankill had to go to the Cupar Street Clinic to get a polio vaccination. In the waiting room, the mothers would talk away to each other like everything was all right, agree that it was terrible what was going on, so it was, and that it was a small minority on both sides that was causing all the trouble, so it was. They would not dare to get any more specific, for fear there would be an unhealthy exchange in a clinic with such large needles present. But although we queued together for polio injections on the Peace Line, that wasn't the same as marching together for peace in public. You were supposed to march against them, not with them!

On that sunny August day, the front page of the
Belfast Telegraph
had a picture showing our mountain, the Black Mountain, rising behind a 25,000 strong throng of widely flared women in Woodvale Park. In the same picture, I could make out the trees in the park where my name was carved alongside that of Sharon Burgess. Elton John and Kiki Dee were at No.1, but it seemed possible now that Sharon might go breaking my heart anyway. In the grainy image on the front page of my papers, I could also see the fields on the slopes of the Black Mountain in the background, where, only a few hours ago, I had sat and watched the huge rally for peace. I had been a tiny dot up there behind it all.

Most of the women in our street, including my mother, had decided to go to the rally. My mother said she would know some of the Catholic women from the Falls Road, because she used to sew with them before the Troubles. The few women in our street who stayed behind that day were the ones who believed that God or the man they voted for – or both – would disapprove of marching for peace with Catholics, or ‘Roman Catholics', as Mrs Piper called them. She always corrected you for saying ‘Catholic', which was almost as wicked as saying ‘Derry' instead of ‘Londonderry'. But for a brief interval that summer, the Mrs Pipers were the minority.

Of course, most of the men stayed at home. It seemed that peace was women's work. Manning vigilante barricades, hijacking buses and joining the UDA was for my gender. Titch McCracken said you were only a real Ulsterman if you were prepared to fight and die to keep Ulster British. I was prepared to defend the earth from an alien invasion, but that was as far as I was willing to go.

As I climbed up the fields that day, I wondered why a boy could only watch peace. Reaching the higher fields, I was amazed at the sight of the crowds in Woodvale Park that afternoon, and moved by the sound of singing and cheering. A strange mix of laughter and the refrain of ‘Abide with Me' was bouncing off the Black Mountain that day. This was unbelievable.

Unexpectedly, I found myself weeping. I was used to the echo of bomb blasts and gunfire. Were we really capable of this? It seemed a lot harder than fighting. This was the answer. The Troubles would be over soon. One day the killing would stop. There would be no more bombs at the shops and no more soldiers on the streets. And everyone would agree that all the fighting had been a waste of life. I was living in hope, so I was.

Chapter 16
Puppy Love

I
hated spots, so I did. An enormous zit always seemed to erupt on the end of my nose just in time for the Westy Disco on a Saturday night. Sharon Burgess would have been too sensitive to my feelings to have ever drawn attention to such things, but I feared my big red nose could be seen throbbing in the dark, like the disco lights that flashed in time with ‘Shang-a-Lang'. So I applied Clearasil lotion to my pitted face every day, in spite of the typical taunts I knew this would draw from my big brother. I even tried to burn off my spots with Brut. I already of course had some personal experience of the proven fiery effects of aftershave on sensitive skin, and so I splashed it all over my spots. It hurt, but it didn't work. It just made the spots grow larger.

I wanted to look good for my first sweetheart: I needed to retain her affections under possible threat. The disturbing revelations of the wee millie at my jumble-sale fiasco were still ringing in my ears: ‘She's only going out with you because she fancies your big brother, ya know.'

I repeated these words in my head many times thereafter. Even when I tried to forget them, they wouldn't go away. It was like putting ABBA's
Greatest Hits
on repeat on the stereogram in the sitting room and not being able to get ‘I Do, I Do, I Do …' out of your head for the rest of the day.

I never mentioned any of this to Sharon Burgess, because I believed she was innocent until proven guilty. It would have been very out of character for the lovely Sharon Burgess to be going out with a wee lad just to get close to his big brother. She was too perfect to do anything like that. Her deep brown eyes were too bright and honest to be clouded by any such deceit. Her skin was soft and beautiful, and she never had any spots. Sharon Burgess was like a Miss World, but younger, in parallels and without a tiara. Our family watched
Miss World
on TV every year. It was real family viewing. My mother admired the evening gowns, and my father enjoyed the swimsuits. My brothers and I were also more than susceptible to the charms of this beauty contest, and we enjoyed picking our favourite ones every year, like in the
Eurovision Song Contest
. One year, however, we were sent to bed early for fighting, after my big brother accused me of staring at Miss Argentina's diddies.

To bring up the damaging gossip I had heard about my own personal Miss Upper Shankill and my big brother carried the risk of accusing my sweetheart of an unproven crime. People in Belfast got accused of things they hadn't done all the time, so I was determined not to make the same mistake myself. It would have been as bad as suggesting that Sarah Jane Smith only assisted the Doctor in the TARDIS because she fancied the Master. This was just as unthinkable, and to suggest such a thing would just have made Sharon chuck me. I did, however, closely observe any interactions she had with my big brother – but I couldn't detect any signs of adoration. I even secretly looked up the problem page of Irene Maxwell's
Jackie
one week before I delivered it, to see if there were any letters from a girl called Sharon in Belfast who fancied her boyfriend's big brother. I also consoled myself with the thought that my big brother wasn't interested in my girlfriend anyway, because she was too young for him and he preferred girls who did gymnastics.

To look handsome enough for Sharon Burgess necessitated well-pressed parallels, polished platforms and feathered hair from His n' Hers beside the graveyard where Sharon's own mother did the feathering. But I knew I could only ever be superficially handsome without perfect skin like David Cassidy and perfect teeth like Donny Osmond. So I began a war on acne. Although I spent many hours on the battlefield in front of the bathroom mirror, I never seemed to win a strategic victory. I tried squeezing the most persistent spots, but that just made them bigger and then I would get shouted at by my mother for splatting zit pus on the bathroom mirror. Pinching the most stubborn spot was like trying to push an already torn newspaper through a customer's letterbox: it just made things worse. I found myself facing defeat on a daily basis.

Then, as if the acne wasn't bad enough, I began to notice that my teeth were growing in a very strange manner. I noticed this change over the course of a few months, during my daily inspection of my face in the mirror, when I would be searching hopefully but in vain for signs of new hard hairs on my upper lip. I would also scan my skin for newly erupted or potentially threatening spot sites. At first, it was barely noticeable, with my upper canines growing down like those of a normal human, but after a while I observed that they kept growing further and further downwards. To my horror, I realised that I was developing fangs! It was ghoulish – I was beginning to look like Dracula. At Halloween I didn't have to buy plastic fangs in a Lucky Bag any more, because my real teeth were becoming monstrous enough. I was turning into the only good livin' vampire in history. How could this be happening? My mother was next to notice this dental deformity, and I knew it was becoming obvious when my big brother began referring to me as ‘Fang'. I knew a visit to the dreaded dentist was inevitable.

The dentist's surgery was in a big old three-storey house overlooking Woodvale Park, where they even vandalised the bushes. When I sat in the dentist's chair, I could see the tops of tall trees that had ‘Tony Loves Sharon – True' carved into their boughs with the penknife I had won at the fairground in Millisle. Whenever I was trapped in that chair to have a hateful filling done, I would try to think of pleasant things to distract me from the pain. So, as the dentist drilled, I would look out of the window across the park and imagine Agnetha up a tree, singing ‘Fernando'.

On the day my mother took me along to have my fangs checked, I sat in that same chair, dreading a diagnosis that would necessitate a cold sharp steel injection into the roof of my mouth. Fortunately, on this occasion, this was not to be the case. ‘Your son requires orthodontic treatment as a matter of urgency, Mrs Macaulay,' said the dentist. ‘I will arrange an appointment for him to see Mrs Osborne immediately.'

Within two weeks, I had my first visit to the orthodontist to arrange for a brace to be fitted, so that my vampire mouth could be pulled into shape. Mrs Osborne's orthodontic surgery was located in one wing of her huge house up the Malone Road, where all the wealthy people lived. On my first appointment there, I was amazed to discover how the real rich people lived.

Before this, the biggest house I had ever been in was a four-bedroom detached house up the Antrim Road with a double garage and an avocado bidet. That had been impressive – but I had never been inside anything quite like this before. There were rooms everywhere, and the walls were covered with dark polished wood instead of woodchip wallpaper. There was wood on the floor as well, instead of shag pile. There were no fluorescent light tubes in the kitchen. It was much more old-fashioned than our house, more like the Rowings' place, but bigger and richer. They hadn't knocked down the walls between the toilet and the bathroom, neither had they removed any chimney breasts to make more room and put in an electric fire. There were no lava lamps or brown suede pouffes, even though I was certain they could have afforded dozens of them. They had very old-looking wooden furniture that you couldn't get on hire purchase in Gillespie & Wilson on the Shankill, and they had old chiming grandfather clocks and silver candlesticks you couldn't buy in the Club Book.

All of this made me a little nervous. When we arrived at Mrs Osborne's front door, I noticed it had stained-glass windows like in a church. We were welcomed by a friendly receptionist, and there was a woman with a mop bucket, washing all the floors. ‘Your granny used to clean for people in big houses up here, y'know, son,' my mother explained.

Being surrounded by such opulence, I expected Mrs Osborne to have a bun in her hair, and I assumed she would put us down with lots of ‘ings', but when we met her she wasn't like that at all. Yes, she did talk like a lady on Radio Ulster, but she was very warm and friendly. I was wearing my BRA uniform, and I wondered if that was what made her so nice to me, but she seemed to be so genuine that she might even fix my fangs if she found out I was a paperboy with dirty hands from up the Shankill.

My mother accompanied me to Mrs Osborne's palace that day, and, because we were on the Malone Road, she spoke to the orthodontist in her Gloria Hunniford telephone voice. She attempted most of her ‘ings' in such locations, even though she knew my father would have disapproved. ‘Are you go-ing to be eat-ing some cucumber sandwiches on the lawn in the gard-ing ?!' Daddy would mock, when he suspected she was getting above her station. ‘No son of mine will ever try to be something he's not!' he would say to me at the slightest hint of an emergent middle-class BRA accent.

The first visit to my orthodontist was all very pleasant and going very well.

‘Yes, the boy will need a brace on his upper teeth for about twelve months,' advised a very professional Mrs Osborne.

‘Will he have to wear the brace while he is eat-ing?' enquired my mother politely.

‘No, he can take it out during meals. We will take an imprint of his teeth at the next appointment, but he will have to have two teeth extracted first,' she continued in a matter-of-fact manner.

Silence.

‘Does he have to have some teeth tak-ing out?' asked my mother, with an unmistakable look of concern on her face.

‘Yes, my dear. These two here,' replied Mrs Osborne pointing with her sharp steel instrument at my two condemned teeth.

Another pause.

I knew what my mother was thinking. I immediately deduced the source of her concern and her next question simply confirmed my conclusion.

‘But our Tony has a bad heart, so he does, and Mr Pantridge at the Royal says that if he ever has to get a tooth out, he needs to go into hospital in case, well, just in case,' she said, while making the strange expression with her eyebrows she sometimes used to indicate to other adults that I wasn't supposed to be hearing something.

‘Will he be all right?'

‘This little chap will be just fine,' replied Mrs Osborne, clearly untroubled by the life-threatening situation she was forcing me into. I had never heard someone who wasn't English use the word ‘chap' before. They always talked about ‘chaps' in
The Two Ronnies
on BBC 1.

‘I will arrange for the extraction to be carried out at the School of Dentistry in the Royal,' added Mrs Osborne.

I was in shock. I had lots of questions in my head. Was it a life-threatening operation? What are the average survival rates for boys with bad hearts getting teeth out?

I found I wanted to ask the question they always asked Dr McCoy in the sickbay in
Star Trek
in such dire circumstances: ‘What are my chances, Bones?'

But here I was in a big house up the Malone Road under the authority of a posh lady who you just could never question, and so I didn't dare articulate my inquiries out loud. I quietly accepted my fate. My mother looked worried, but did not question either. It wasn't fair. Just when I had begun to accept that I had a future with a fully beating heart, now everything was up in the air again – and all for the sake of having teeth more like an Osmond than a vampire.

On the day of the operation, I was very nervous. When we arrived at the Royal, and I got my first whiff of disinfectant at the front door, I was more worried than the day of my Eleven Plus or the night I had to do a violin solo at the school concert. I spent what I knew could very well be my final hour sitting in the waiting area, reading an old copy of
Look-in
I found among a pile of well-thumbed
Woman's Owns
. I tried to read an article about why Alvin Stardust always wore a black leather glove on one hand, but I couldn't really concentrate.

As the nurse ushered me into the operating room, I was aware my days could be numbered. I said a prayer and did a deal with God: as I had asked Jesus into my heart on the bin at the caravan and been good livin' for years now, I in return asked if He would look after me and keep me out of Heaven for another wee while yet. But before I could finish the Lord's Prayer, they had knocked me out with gas.

Five minutes later, when I awoke, I was alive but minus two teeth. I was very drowsy and a little confused, and was sick once again over my Harrington jacket, but at least my bad heart was still going. I started to cry like a wee boy, and it was all very embarrassing as my mammy comforted me, but at least I had survived. I thought I had been knocked out for hours. It was like when the Russians put a drug in James Bond's drink and made him have hallucinations, before torturing him for secrets about big atom bombs. The whole day my mother had pretended it was all very routine, but now she also looked very relieved indeed. I would live to deliver the papers another day. And if I was very lucky and splashed on just enough Brut, I might still experience endless snogs with Sharon Burgess at the Westy Disco.

Now that the two teeth beside my incisors had been removed and it became clear that my bad heart was continuing to beat, I was able to return to Mrs Osborne, so that the process of bringing the rebellious fangs under control could be continued. I thought the trauma was over, but there was more pain and humiliation to come. Mrs Osborne took an imprint of my upper teeth with horrible putty that tasted like mud with toothpaste, and then she made a brace of plastic and wire especially for my mouth. I had looked forward to getting my brace, because it made you look grown-up, but as soon as I inserted it in my mouth for the first time I discovered an unforeseen problem – I couldn't speak properly! A brace gave you a speech impediment. Every ‘s' sound became a ‘ssch'.

‘How am I sschupposed to sschpeak with thissch thing in?' I complained to my mother.

‘You'll just have to put up or shut up, love!' Mammy replied. ‘You don't want to end up looking like Christopher Lee when you grow up. You'll never get no girls nor nathin' if you end up lookin' like a vampire.'