Paperboy (5 page)

‘Who do you think you're lookin' at?' I shouted aggress-ively across the test tubes. I felt like a piece of phosphorous that was just about to ignite in oxygen.

‘None of your f**k-ing business!' Timothy snorted back. He had stabbed me with an obscene ‘ing'. His daddy was a lawyer and his mother wore a fur coat and too much make-up at the School Prize Giving, where his brother always got a prize for Latin.

Judy Carlton looked at me sympathetically, but not without a certain sparkle in her lovely blue eyes. I noted this, admired her lips and filed this reaction away for future analysis. I resisted my urge to assault Timothy with a conveniently lit Bunsen burner, as I thought it would just prove his hypothesis. Anyway, I knew this would not be an appropriate course of action for the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast.

Sometimes it seemed that there were always secrets to be kept, no matter where you went. At orchestra practice at the School of Music on Saturday mornings, I met lots of other Catholic kids who went to grammar schools on the Falls Road. That really threw me. I had assumed that because the Falls was the Catholic version of the Shankill, they wouldn't have grammar schools in their streets either. I didn't know why there were no grammar schools on the Shankill Road. No one seemed to mind anyway.

It was at the School of Music that I met Patrick Walsh. He played the violin better than me, but his voice hadn't broken yet. While I languished in the back row of the second violins, Patrick was given solos at the front of the first violins. He went to St Malachy's Boys Grammar School on the Antrim Road, where priests taught them maths. St Malachy's was the nearest Catholic school to BRA, so the teachers in both establishments arranged that we would never get out of school at the same time: they were afraid, it seemed, of what would happen if we ever met each other. Patrick was from Andersonstown where the IRA ruled and the kerbs were painted green, white and orange – which was the opposite of red, white and blue.

One day, during a break from the musical massacre of one of Beethoven's finer pieces, Patrick asked me, ‘Do you go to Belfast Royal Academy?' His lip seemed to curl up slightly as he said the word ‘Royal'. I had never heard anyone say ‘Royal' before without obvious deference, so I thought this was odd.

‘Aye, I go to BRA, so I do,' I replied.

‘Are you a ... Prod?' he pressed. Patrick seemed to have difficulty saying the word ‘Prod', and there was that lip curl again. He seemed to be upset at me being what I was.

‘Aye,' I replied.

‘You're rich!' he then squeaked, accusingly.

This was front-page news to me. I was once again con-fused. At BRA I was poor, but now at the School of Music, just like in the Upper Shankill, I was rich again. And now there was a need for yet another secret. We only met once a week at the School of Music, so I had thought that I wouldn't need to keep any secrets – but now I realised that I would have to keep quiet about being a Shankill paperboy here too.

Patrick however knew the truth, and so he would regularly educate me on a Saturday morning. He said that his father worked at Queen's University, and knew all about being oppressed by the Brits for hundreds of years. He said that I was an Orangeman and that as such I would be handed all the best jobs on a plate. I knew I wasn't an Orangeman because my father kept the Sash his father wore up in the roof space, but Patrick did seem to have a point about all the best jobs, as delivering the papers for Oul' Mac was one of the best jobs around.

One seriously savage afternoon, when all the buses were off and I was definitely going to be late for my papers, our headmaster asked an English teacher from Templepatrick (where the doctors lived) to transport a handful of us safely from the bosom of BRA to the Ballygomartin Road.

‘Where's the Ballygomartin Road?' asked the English teacher, to my astonishment. Okay, so it wasn't Shakespeare, but it was only two miles up the road.

‘It's an extension of the Shankill Road,' replied the headmaster. It stung to hear my humble origins exposed with such authority. The English teacher's face turned the same colour as his chalky fingers. This surprised me. I couldn't think of a single episode of the Troubles which involved English teachers from Templepatrick being regarded as legitimate targets on the Shankill Road. In Belfast, legitimate targets were more likely to be taxi drivers and milkmen.

The English teacher looked edgy as we crammed into his spotless hatchback, which had Jane Austen on the back seat and a Radio 4 play on the radio. I definitely smelled sweat as he drove us up the Road. He was never this twitchy when teaching us about the war poets, but he put me in mind of those lines from Wilfred Owen when I noticed his ‘hanging face, like a devil's, sick of sin'. He was only driving us up the Shankill Road: he wasn't being gassed in the trenches! As the teacher in question transported us silently, I imagined the paperboy from his area, sitting snugly on a brand-new Chopper bike, and presenting him with a pristine copy of
The Times
. I was sure that his kids in Templepatrick would be getting Eleven Plus practice papers instead of the
Whizzer and Chips.

The entrance to our estate was up a dark muddy lane. The mothers had been campaigning for a proper road on UTV, but it was still just a mucky path. On one side of the lane was the Girls' Secondary School and on the other side was the Boys' Secondary School. Most of the Shankill went there at eleven years old when they failed the Eleven Plus. Neither school was renowned for academic achievement. My mother always said it was a good thing I hadn't failed my Eleven Plus, because I would have been ‘eaten alive in there'. My English teacher must have had similar concerns of being cannibalised as he drove up that dirty dark lane, sandwiched between two staunch secondary schools, for he proceeded with extreme caution. It was like the Doctor leaving the TARDIS for the first time, having just materialised on a strange alien planet.

As he drove along the lane slowly, the teacher at last cut the silence to say, ‘This looks like the sort of place they take you in the dark to put a bullet in your head!'

His passengers laughed instantly, but only very briefly, because he didn't join in. We thought he was joking, but of course he wasn't. I, for one, felt offended, and the following year, I resented the same man through every page of
Pygmalion
. Of course, I knew from the front page of the papers every day that people like me and Thomas were getting bullets in their heads just for being Catholics or Protestants from the wrong sort of place. But this was the sort of place I came from, this sort of place was my home, and this was the sort of place where I determinedly delivered forty-eight
Belfast Telegraphs
each night in the darkness.

Chapter 5
A Rival Arrives

I
was at the top of my game, the pinnacle of my profession. I had mastered newspaper delivery. No hedge was too high, no letterbox too slim, no holiday supplement too fat and no poodle too ferocious. I had delivered through hail, hoods, bullets and barricades. My paperbag was blacker than anyone else's, the blackest of all paperboys' bags. I had alone survived, when all around me had been robbed or sacked, or both. Oul' Mac even gave me eye contact.

I had achieved high levels of customer satisfaction too. One day, when I was at the doctor's with my mother and a boil on my thigh, we met Mrs Grant, from No. 2, who always gave me a toffee-apple tip at Halloween.

‘Your Tony's a great wee paperboy, so he is,' she said, as she darted across the doctor's waiting room, on her way to pick up a prescription for her Richard's chest. The waiting room in the surgery had a shiny old wooden floor that you stared at while you waited, dreading a diagnosis of doom. It smelt of varnish and wart ointment.

‘He's the best wee paperboy our street's ever had!' the generous Mrs Grant added. ‘He's never late, there's no oul' cheek and he closes the gate.' The whole waiting room stopped coughing, and looked at me admiringly.

‘Och, God love the wee crater,' two chirpy old ladies in hats chorused in unison.

This adulation momentarily anaesthetised the pain of my throbbing boil, which had brazenly blossomed on the precise part of my thigh where my paperbag would rub. The word was out: it was official. I was a prince among paperboys. It should have been on the front page of the
Belfast Telegraph
itself.

But then it happened. As unforeseen as a soldier's sudden appearance in your front garden, along came Trevor Johnston. A rival had arrived.

Known to his friends as ‘Big Jaunty', Trevor Johnston was older than me, taller than me and cooler than me. He wore the latest brown parallel trousers with tartan turn-ups and a matching brown tank top, from the window in John Frazer's. John Frazer's was the bespoke tailor to the men of the Shankill, whether it was flares, parallels, platform shoes, gargantuan shirt collars or tartan scarves you were after. This emporium of 1970s style was just across the road from the wee pet shop where I got goldfish and tortoises that died, and a mere black-taxi ride down the Shankill Road. From the moment you walked through the front door of the shop and got searched for incendiary devices, you could smell the alluring richness of polyester. It was where I always spent all my Christmas tips.

It seemed that every single time I went to buy some new clothes in Frazer's, there was Trevor Johnston, perusing the parallels. In fact, it was possible that he only left the place during bomb scares. A veritable fashion icon of the Upper Shankill, Trevor also wore a Harrington jacket with the collar turned up. I knew these were very expensive. My big brother had got a Harrington for his birthday, and it was twenty weeks at 99p from my mother's Great Universal Club Book. When I said that I wanted one for my birthday too, my brother tore the page in question out of the Club Book and fed it to Snowball, our already overweight albino rabbit. I had to settle for a pair of faux-satin Kung Fu pyjamas instead. They were twenty weeks at 49p, but I was determined that my Harrington-jacket day would come.

When Trevor Johnston put all his chic Shankill garments together, he looked like Eric Faulkner from the Bay City Rollers, and everybody loved Eric. When I stood beside Trevor in my duffle coat and grammar-school scarf, I looked more like Brian Faulkner, the last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. And nobody loved him.

One day, without even a five-minute telephone warning, there was Trevor Johnston, standing with the other paperboys, waiting for Oul' Mac's van to arrive with the bad news. Evidently, he had been headhunted at short notice. The day before, Oul' Mac had sacked Titch McCracken, who was ginger but good at football like Geordie Best, and brilliant at twirling his band stick on the Twelfth. Poor wee Titch had been having a sly smoke in the red telephone box on our street and had inadvertently dropped a lit match into his paperbag. Minutes later, the ash of thirty-two
Belly Tellys
and a half-cremated paperbag on the floor of the telephone box was all that remained of Titch's career. It had undoubtedly been the finest fire in our street since the last Eleventh boney, but Mrs Matchett across the road phoned the RUC to inform them that the IRA had carried out an incendiary attack on our telephone box. When Oul' Mac arrived on the scene, he was so incensed that he couldn't even speak. This was gross misconduct. Titch was so scared that he couldn't speak either. He knew he was finished. Oul' Mac's disciplinary procedure involved kicking the culprit on the backside halfway up the street, until Titch ran up an entry crying, and from a distance we could hear him telling Oul' Mac where he could stick his paper round.

So, Trevor was here to replace wee Titch. I hated the way all the girls called him ‘Big Jaunty', with gormless smiles on their faces. Irene Maxwell – whose da raced pigeons and limped – got a
Jackie
and
Look-in
every week, and so she was something of an authority on matters of art and culture. She once made the momentous prediction that ‘them uns from Sweden that won the
Eurovision Song Contest
are going to be more popular than yer man Gary Glitter.'

Every time I arrived at Irene's front gate with her weekly delivery of pop culture, she would gush, ‘Big Jaunty's lovely, so he is. He looks like David Cassidy.' One night, I even spotted Irene and her best friend, wee Sandra Hull (who was only six, got a
Twinkle
and permanently had parallel snatter tracks under her nose), following Trevor street by street on his paper round.

Sharon Burgess had never once followed me on my paper round. Living as she did half a mile away, on the other side of the Ballygomartin Road, in one of the clean council houses on the West Circular Road, Sharon never got the chance to revere me at work. Her father was Big Ronnie who riveted in the shipyard, and her mother was Wee Jean who permed pensioners in His n' Hers beside the graveyard.

One Saturday night shortly after the arrival of Trevor Johnston on the paper-delivery scene, I bumped into Sharon at the chippy, with the usual bagful of
Ulsters
on my shoulder. Sharon looked lovely, with her hair flicked like the blonde one in Pan's People on
Top of the Pops
.

‘Do you wanna come with me, doin' my
Ulsters
?' I asked romantically, expecting an immediately affirmative response.

‘Wise up, wee lad, I'm gettin' a gravy chip and a pastie supper for my da, and
The Two Ronnies
is on our new colour TV the night!' she retorted, devastatingly. Sharon had rejected me for a gravy chip and three old Ronnies! And so no girl had ever followed me and my
Belly Tellys
, just wee hoods and robbers.

Of course, Trevor Johnston looked nothing like David Cassidy. Just because he was the first wee lad in our street to get his hair feathered in His n' Hers didn't mean he looked like a pop star. Who would want to look like David Cassidy anyway? He was crap.

I preferred to call ‘Big Jaunty' by his proper name: plain old-fashioned Trevor. I enjoyed that. But I also knew I had to keep well in with him, in spite of everything. Rumour had it that Trevor's da was in the Ulster Volunteer Force, and so it was best not upset him. I noticed that Trevor was the only paperboy who never had so much as an attempted robbery. I didn't know much about the UVF, except that they killed Catholics and beat up burglars. I still couldn't distinguish the difference between the UVF and the UDA, but I reckoned they were a bit like
Shoot
and
Scorcher
, the two main football comics I delivered: they each had different fans, but the same goals. I concluded that they were both just IRAs for Protestants. Trevor's da had big muscles and UVF tattoos, and wore more gold rings and necklaces than even Mrs Mac. He worked in the foundry with my father, but he seemed to have a lot more money than us. He ran the UVF drinking club down the Road, and I suspected he didn't serve Ulster entirely as a volunteer.

Trevor's da had led the boycott of goods from the South of Ireland in our estate. He put up posters saying: ‘Don't Buy Free State Goods' on the same lamp posts the children would swing on. He also promoted his campaign by marching around to everyone's doors and telling my mother and others like her to stop buying Galtee bacon and cheese, because by doing so they were just paying for a United Ireland. Ulster was saying ‘No' to Catholic bacon. I hadn't realised the pigs down south were Republicans and even at the age of twelve and a half, I was slightly sceptical as to the purported impact of processed cheese on the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. More importantly, I loved Galtee cheese, especially on a toasted Veda loaf from the Ormo Mini Shop, and I knew my mother snacked on it too while she was watching
Coronation Street
. Once a fortnight Mammy did a surreptitious shop on the Falls Road and would bring home a forbidden block of delicious Galtee from wee Theresa's corner shop. (My mother had sewed trousers with wee Theresa in the suit factory before the Troubles. Apparently she was one of the ‘good ones'.) When my granny visited, we would hide the treacherous cheese in the fruit tray at the bottom of the fridge, underneath the oranges, of course.

When I delivered
Muscle Men Monthly
to Trevor's da, there were always men with moustaches and dark glasses smoking in their living room, and I could hear Elvis records playing on the stereogram. Sometimes I wondered why so many Loyalists were Elvis fans: they always seemed more Paisley than Presley to me. There was no obvious connection between the King and the members of the UVF, apart from maybe ‘Jailhouse Rock', and even that didn't really make sense, because that was the young, thin Elvis, and these Protestant paramilitaries seemed to like old, fat, white cat-suit Elvis. But maybe Elvis was a Loyalist. Maybe he was doing all those gigs in Las Vegas for the Loyalist prisoners. He could have filled thousands of the collection buckets that came round our door.

One Saturday night, at our local disco, ‘the Westy', in a lull between Suzi Quatro and Mudd, I asked Sharon Burgess secretly if she thought Trevor's da was in the UVF. The Westy Disco was a good place to pose such a discreet question, because it was dark and noisy, and no one could hear, or see your eyes.

‘Big Jaunty's da?' she replied. ‘I don't know, but Big Jaunty's lovely, so he is, he looks like David Cassidy.' I dropped my carton of hot peas and vinegar over the new platform shoes I had just got from John Frazer's.

For six months, Trevor turned up on time and never thieved. He consistently delivered, and was even starting to get some eye contact from Oul' Mac. My position was under threat. The more time I spent with Trevor, the more he irked me.

He was of course the only paperboy with no spots. He never had to use any of his tips to buy a tube of Clearasil which he would have to hide at the back of the bathroom cabinet, behind his father's old Brylcreem jar (that had not been used since he went baldy), in case his big brother found it and accused him of wearing girl's make-up.

I noticed, when we lined up to get the newspapers from Oul' Mac's van, that Trevor always smelled of Brut aftershave – and he hadn't even started shaving! And so it came to pass that Trevor Johnston would be responsible for the most embarrassing incident of my life to date.

Spurred on by jealousy of my rival, I used some of my birthday money to proudly buy my first bottle of Brut from Boots, near the City Hall. I knew that Henry Cooper wore this aftershave, and he had knocked out Muhammed Ali. I only wanted to knock out Trevor Johnston, so I was sure it would do the trick. As I opened my first bottle of Brut, I recalled Henry Cooper in the TV adverts saying that he splashed it all over. The instructions on the bottle itself said the same thing: ‘Splash all over.' So that night, as I was getting ready to meet Sharon Burgess, to watch her wee brother play the flute at the band parade, I did just that. By this time, Sharon and I had become an item, much to my great joy.

But no one had warned me that ‘all over' should not include your jimmy joe. As the burning sensation increased, I rapidly ran a cold bath, submerged the painful region and sat, shivering and suffering in silence, in the vain hope that no one would notice. My mother's intuition, however, intervened to inform her that something was amiss. Her persistent knocking at the locked bathroom door eventually forced me to admit my error with the aftershave.

‘Come on, love, tell me what's wrong,' she pleaded. ‘I'm your mammy, love, it's all right.'

‘Okay!' I finally confessed. ‘I put Brut on my jimmy joe!' I blurted out, ‘and it's killin' me!'

Within seconds, Mammy was down the stairs and into the greenhouse in the back garden, where my father was watering his tomatoes.

‘Oh my God, Eric, we're gonna have to take our Tony to the Royal! He's put aftershave on his wee jimmy joe!' she shrieked, much, much too loudly.

Could it get any worse? The prospect of being wheeled into Casualty in the Royal with a Brut burn on my jimmy joe was an absolute nightmare. My mother's unnecessary use of the word ‘wee' in this context completed my humiliation.

I heard the sound of the watering can clattering on the crazy paving and my father shouting: ‘The stupid wee glipe!' But, then to my relief, he added, ‘No son of mine will be going to the Royal with an aftershave burn on his …'

This welcome pronouncement was interrupted by the outbreak of hysterical laugher from the nearby garden shed. My big brother had been in there with my wee brother, teaching him how to play poker with matches, and they had heard everything. The reverberation of their laughter on the shaky wooden walls of the garden shed continued long after the pain had subsided. My wee brother was only six years old at the time, but for weeks afterwards, he replaced ‘Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall' with a new nursery rhyme, which he chanted again and again, with a delighted chuckle as he bounced up and down the street on his space hopper: ‘Our Tony put Brut on his wee jimmy joe/Our Tony put Brut on his wee jimmy joe'.