Paperboy (7 page)

‘I don't have any money,' I cry, my newly broken voice returning to prepubescent shrillness. I am telling the truth. My boots are empty. Instinctively, I then turn out my pockets. There is no money, just the remains of a melting white sweetie mouse encrusting a bull's-eye marble. My assailants don't seem interested.

They don't speak. I freeze. I don't understand. ‘They are IRA men after an easy target,' I fret inwardly. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!'

It starts to rain very heavily. Icy drops dilute the warm tears on my shivering cheeks. Suddenly, Mr Watson with the dyed black comb-over from No. 24 – whose wife gets
Woman
and who always gives a big tip at Easter – comes running down the street towards us. My oppressors see him coming, and mistakenly sense an attempted rescue. The tough guys just run off. But Mr Watson is just running to escape the downpour of hail. I stand alone in the trampled weeds of the garden of No. 4 beside a small gnome with a fishing rod and his nose broken off. Mr Watson runs straight past me. He has tonight's
Belfast Telegraph
over his head to protect his much-too-black Brylcreemed hair.

I must run home. But, I then remember, no one is at home. I must run to the Westy Disco, where Dad will be playing ‘Mamma Mia' and Mum will be clipping Geordie Cooper around the ear for stealing penny chews, as per usual. I must tell them what has just happened. I can't catch a breath. I can't speak. They had put a gun in my back. I start to hyperventilate. (I thought only Americans hyperventilated.) I burst into the Westy Disco before Uncle Henry can even breathalyse me. A group of adults and wee girls gather around me at the tuck shop. I am crying. Then I am embarrassed: what if Sharon Burgess sees me like this?

The mood of the tuck-shop crowd surrounding me changes from concern, to shock and then to outrage. Meanwhile, Geordie Cooper empties the penny-chew jar behind them all.

The general consensus is that the IRA has just tried to kill me.

‘Them f**kin' Provos have just tried to a pick off another wee Prod the night!' shouts Philip Ferris insensitively. The rumour spreads across the dance floor that paperboys are now ‘legitimate targets'. Then I notice the muffled sounds of Showaddywaddy from the loudspeakers in the background – it's ‘Three Steps to Heaven'. The lyrics mock me. I feel as if I have just taken several steps closer to heaven than I had ever wanted to.

Within twenty-four hours, I am in Tennent Street police station with my father and a serious-looking young policeman with a moustache, called Darren. (All the RUC men have moustaches, and many of them are called Darren.) I feel more unsafe inside the RUC station than when I was cornered in a garden by the Showaddywaddy guy, because the Provos keep attacking the Tennent Street station with mortar bombs, and even though the building is surrounded by concrete and fencing nearly as tall as a peace wall, the mortars always get through. I pray the Provos haven't planned an attack while I am giving my statement.

Constable Darren shows me black-and-white pictures of hard men, the way they do in
Starsky and Hutch
, except these guys are all white. None of them looks like the Showaddywaddy guy, and they all look the same to me: scowling faces, long hair and sideburns like Elvis. I conclude that all criminals have sideburns in the same way that all policemen have moustaches, and that this distinctive use of facial hair is why they find it so easy to avoid one another. I point to the one who looks most like my attacker.

‘No, he's in the Maze, son,' says Darren the policeman. Then he asks me if they touched me anywhere. I don't understand the question. They stuck a gun in my back: what could be worse than that? As we leave the RUC station, my father tells me that if I should ever set eyes on those two again, I must tell him right away, and that he would ‘take care of the bastards'. I can foresee another outing for the pickaxe handle, but I'm not so sure it would do the job this time.

A few months after this, I was waiting on the Ballygomartin Road for the No. 73 bus across town. It was a slippy Saturday morning. The No. 73 said ‘Malone' on the front, when on its way into town, and ‘Springmartin via Shankill' on the way back. I liked the idea of being on the bus to posh Malone, where my orthodontist lived – but I wondered what the people from over there thought about having to get a rough Springmartin bus into town. But perhaps they didn't get the bus.

I was carrying my violin case this time, instead of my dirty paperbag. My fingertips were sore from last-minute practice. I had string-imprinted fingers and coin-embossed toes! I was on my way to the School of Music for orchestra practice, the only boy from this neck of the woods to go there. I had decided never to reveal to the other second violins that I was a Shankill paperboy. Most of them were Catholic grammar-school girls, and I fancied one of them, a dark-haired girl with a cello and an Irish name I couldn't spell. But I knew the rules: I was the wrong sort from the wrong kind of place. So I settled for a distant admiration of her vibrato. Of course, I didn't tell the other paperboys about the School of Music, either. I knew the combination of mixing with ‘Fenians' and playing ‘poofy' classical music would attract double derision from them.

The bus was late. I wondered if it had been hijacked – but it was a bit early in the day for hijackers. Then, from across the deserted misty road, an old Ford Cortina pulled up abruptly in front of me. It was the Showaddywaddy guy with the gun. He just sat and stared at me. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!'

Old Mrs McCready from No. 25, who always got
The Sunday Post
, arrived beside me at the bus stop, rummaging through her old-lady-shopping trolley bag. She didn't even notice yer man, who continued to just sit and stare at me. I wondered what he was going to do this time. I was a teenager now, with a broken voice and getting taller. I still wasn't a fighter, but I had by now learned a fairly effective ‘hard-man' stare myself that worked with some of the rugby-playing bullies in school. I wasn't sure if it would work with big lads with guns, but I attempted to stare back convincingly. It is possible that carrying a violin undermined the hard- man stare, but then again, gangsters in old black-and-white movies always looked quite threatening while carrying violin cases, though of course they didn't wear duffle coats and grammar-school scarves.

After what seemed like an endless five minutes, the Showaddywaddy guy simply sneered and drove off, giving me an ‘I-know-where-you-live' kind of stare. However, even though I thought about him often after that, I never saw him again. The No. 73 eventually arrived, and I ‘dinged' my ticket and sat down with my violin case on my knee, shaking a little. I could hear my bow rattling inside. I wasn't going to tell my father. I didn't want him to take care of yer man, because that would mean someone would then take care of my dad. That's how it worked in Belfast. We were going nowhere – the tit-for-tat mindset reigned supreme.

As we travelled down the Shankill Road, the bus driver turned up his wireless. It was Big T on Downtown Radio – he was always on Downtown on Saturday mornings, when you were having an Ulster fry. He was playing Showaddywaddy: they were singing ‘Three Steps to Heaven'. I shivered, so I did.

Chapter 7
Tips and Investments

‘M
oney, Money, Money' was never off the radio. ‘It's a rich man's world!' sang ABBA. In church, however, when I wasn't daydreaming about Agnetha during the sermon, I heard Reverend Lowe teach an alternative message: that money couldn't make you happy. Although there was evidence before us that the happiest people in our congregation seemed to be the two jolly ladies with thick make-up and bright red lipstick who sat at the front in fur coats. They didn't live up our way anymore but came back in their Jaguar once a week to go to church. When they opened their blue Presbyterian hymn books, I could make out, from where we sat at the back of the church, big gold rings on their plump fingers. I also noticed that Reverend Lowe always gave those fleshy hands an extra strong handshake when we all queued up to exchange a few words with him at the church door at the end of every Sunday morning service.

‘They're real ladies and they're very good givers,' Uncle Henry once remarked. He counted the church collection.

My father constantly reminded me that I was working class and should be very proud that we had no money. ‘No son of his was ever going to get above himself' was another of his usual refrains. So, when I joined the nation's workforce as a paperboy, I didn't dare tell Daddy that I felt very well off indeed. Not only did I get pocket money every Friday night, and extra pocket money if there was overtime at the foundry, but I also earned £1.50 per week from Oul' Mac, and on top of that I got tips. If you performed your duties well and with a smile, you could, I quickly realised, end up with more tips than wages. I soon learned the earning potential of providing a first-class service with a charming smile. Part of my brain had also developed a highly sensitive ‘tip detector'.

Apart from the more obviously promising tipping scenarios – such as holiday times or when the distinctive smell of Tennant's Lager could be detected on the breath of the customer in question – I was soon able to discern, from the use of certain words, the likelihood of potential additional earnings. ‘Sorry, I've nothing smaller, love,' for example, signalled a healthy tip. This was the ‘no change, big tip' scenario. On one such occasion, Mrs Grant from No. 2 told me to keep the change from a ten-pound note. I was aghast at her generosity, but spent the rest of the evening planning what I would do with the money. Then, the next day, she asked me for a fiver back: she had, she said, made a mistake because her nerves were bad with her Richard's pains. So I had to postpone my plans for a fishing rod and an Etch-a-Sketch.

‘Thanks for keepin' an eye on pussy over the Twelfth, love,' also signalled that a good tip was on the cards. This fell into the category of the ‘additional duties' related tip, and was most commonly bestowed by pet owners during the month of July. This was easy money because the cats didn't seem to care much if their owners never returned from the caravan.

‘Was them robbers at you again the night, love?' or, ‘Och, look at the state of you the night in the rain, ya wee crater,' were also promising remarks, indicating an imminent sympathy tip. I accepted such tips with sad and grateful eyes and closed the gate carefully behind me. Then they would go straight to my boots.

Like the baddies in
Thunderbirds
that I could always recognise from the stubble on their plastic faces, I instinctively understood who would never tip. Mr Black always had a ‘don't-you-bloody-well-think-you're-getting-an-extra-penny-out-of-me,-ya-cheeky-wee-hallion' look on his face on a Friday night, and never tipped.

So, the identity of a possible tip-giver was predictable. The amount and occasion of a tip, however, was as difficult to foresee as the number of milk-bottle tops donated to the
Blue Peter
appeal for Africa in any given week. This element of uncertainty turned the whole tipping experience into something of an adventure. It was like snow on the streets: you never knew how much you were going to get and when exactly you would get it, but once you knew it was on the way, a whole new world of opportunities for having fun was opened up to you.

The sum of my pocket money, wages and tips was sometimes as much as £4 by the time it was Saturday night. I was rich! Patrick Walsh at the School of Music said all Protestants were rich and that we kept all the Catholics poor. I wasn't so sure, because I had seen a picture of the Pope's church in Rome on
John Craven's Newsround
, and it was even bigger than Ian Paisley's church on the Ravenhill Road. However, I couldn't really argue with Patrick, not just because he was a first violin and I was only a second, but because I was probably the only Protestant he had ever met, and I had to admit that I was very rich for my age.

However, I tried not to flaunt my wealth, and I learned to use it wisely. I invested a few pounds every month into my Abbey National savings account, where you got ten pence for free at the end of every year just for keeping your money there. The Abbey National was on Royal Avenue in the city centre, beside the Grand Central hotel where the army lived, so it got burnt and bombed quite a few times. In spite of this precarious location, the place was always open with a ‘Business as Usual' sign and a spirited smell of wet smoke. It felt good, queuing up there to make my deposits alongside adults with wallets and purses. The lady behind the counter wore make-up and pearl earrings, talked through her nose and pronounced every ‘ing' as she cheerily accepted all of my investments and firmly stamped my book. The Abbey National savings book had a blue cover like a Presbyterian hymn book, except with a powerful plastic smell. It was the aroma of wealth.

My very first account was for saving up for big expensive things, like a new pair of parallels out of John Frazer's or my ticket for the Bay City Rollers Concert. However, because I was so well-heeled (in platforms of course), I was able to avail of other opportunities for spending my additional disposable income. I quickly learned the hard way though not to play the slot machines in Millisle and not to play poker with my big brother in the shed. I was not prepared to risk losing my hard-earned cash so easily, and also my granny said gambling was a curse and a sin. (This moral outrage about gambling must have put a strain on her marriage, because Granda worked in the bookies on the Donegall Road.) I gave some of my money away to babies in Africa of course, but I still had enough left to invest in all sorts of exciting products.

So I turned to
Look-in
, my favourite magazine full of interviews, crosswords and pin-ups of the Bionic Woman and the Bay City Rollers. The back pages of this wondrous publication had adverts for an array of investment opportunities for a boy of my means that were not readily available from the shops on the Shankill Road. The lack of local consumer choices on the Shankill Road was regularly confirmed by adults all around me, in fact. ‘The Road's nat what it used til be for shappin' no more,' they would say.

So every week, when the magazines arrived in Oul' Mac's shop, I grabbed a
Look-in
and scoured these appealing back-page adverts. I found stamps and books and card collections and strange creatures to buy – all for the cost of a 50p postal order. First of all, I became a member of the Imperial Stamp Club, and got a new set of stamps every month to add to my collection. I got a red stamp collector's book for Christmas and began to stick stamps in the appropriate page for each country. I had never heard of some of the countries and had to look them up in my father's 1959
Pears Cyclopaedia
. Sometimes my father brought home a bag of old stamps from the war he had borrowed from the foundry, and I added these into my growing collection too. After several messy mistakes, I concluded that I should not attempt to stick stamps in my album immediately after doing the papers, as my inky fingers would soil the crisp white pages. From time to time, I borrowed the
Stamp Valuation Book
out of the Shankill Library (along with a
Billy Bunter
or a
Famous Five
). I would search through the catalogue to discover the invariably disappointing value of each stamp.

Next, I invested in a card collection of animals of the world. For a 50p postal order, I got ten animals a month to put in a wee red card container. My favourite card was the one with the skunk. I dreamed of having a pet skunk to come with me on my paper round on a Friday night and spray foul smells on the foul wee hoods. I cancelled my subscription after about sixty animals however, because I was being sent far too many farm animals. ‘Next, they'll be sending me a card of Petra,' I thought. I was very fond of Petra, who was the most popular golden labrador in the Upper Shankill (even if she did poop on all the pavements), but I wanted to collect rare, dangerous, poisonous animals from, say, Borneo – not pets or farm animals from Ballymena. I knew I was the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast, but I had no ethical difficulty with killer animals, because they didn't seem to know any better.

Inevitably, therefore, I moved on from animal cards and joined the Puffin Book Club, to collect books instead. I hadn't fully realised that you could actually buy your own books – I thought you just borrowed them from school or from the Shankill Library. As a member of the Puffin Book Club, I got a set of book labels saying, ‘This book belongs to …' to stick into the inside cover of every book I bought. I would get very excited when my latest book would arrive. I cherished the smell when you opened the first page for the first time. I started with
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, and eventually blew all my tips on Narnia. C.S. Lewis took me away to another land, one where they listened to the children and the baddies didn't rule forever.

I was very proud of my stamp, animal and Narnia collections, but not all of my purchases proved so satisfying. One day, at the back of a
Look-in
summer special, I spotted an advert for ‘sea monkeys'. A 50p postal order would buy me a packet of dried sea-monkey eggs, it seemed. If I simply added water, these tiny alien-like creatures would hatch in a jam jar in my bedroom just like magic, and I could raise whole families of them!

I was attracted to the mystery of this new species, and amazed that I could afford them with my tips. Once the sea monkeys arrived, in a very small packet, I followed all of the instructions carefully. After an initial panic on my part that the creatures had perished in the post, sure enough, they hatched within a few days. Unfortunately however, the ‘sea monkeys' – despite their exotic name – weren't anything like the families of winged aliens pictured in the
Look-in
advert. They were more like the wee flies you got in rock pools at the seaside when you were looking for crabs and dropped your net, slipping on the seaweed and scraping your knees.

In spite of my disappointment, I acknowledged that the sea monkeys were still God's wee creatures, so I cared for my charges like any responsible parent. Then one sad day while I was watching Rolf Harris painting a kangaroo on BBC 1, my wee brother (inspired by Rolf) used my sea monkeys' jam jar for dipping his paintbrush, so that he could fill in Noddy in his colouring book. My erstwhile pets were permanently preserved as flecks in the red paint on the bonnet of Noddy's car. However, given the poor return on this investment, my grief was fairly short-lived. And my wee brother reminded me that although he had indeed made a tragic error, it wasn't half as bad as putting Brut on your jimmy joe.

Shortly after I had recovered from the calamity with the sea monkeys, I noticed another advert in the pages of
Look-in
on how to become a muscle man like a certain Charles Atlas in America. Everything in America was bigger. Mr Atlas had more impressive muscles than the Incredible Hulk, and it said in the advert that if I bought his book and got big muscles like him, then no bullies would ever kick sand in my face again. I couldn't remember anyone ever kicking sand in my face in Millisle – not even a skinhead – because the sand was always too wet and heavy with the rain, but I did like the idea of becoming a big strong muscle man, like this Charles Atlas in America. It would make me safer from robbers on a Friday night and would certainly help if the Provos really did decide to make paperboys ‘legitimate targets'. I would be able to lift a dozen paperbags in one hand and Titch McCracken in the other. I would be strong enough to lift Oul' Mac's van over the barricades in slow motion, like the Six Million Dollar Man himself.

It took a long time to receive a response after I sent off my 50p postal order, but I knew Charles lived in America and realised that it would take a while for him to get back to me. However, on the morning the reply eventually arrived, I was once again disappointed. I spotted the envelope in the hall, shortly after the postman called: it was sticking out from underneath a flier about a sale in the Great Universal Club Book. I retrieved this long-awaited passport to power immediately.

Aware of the slagging potential this delivery could provide for my big brother, I headed straight for my bedroom to open the package in private. When I ripped open the envelope with my feeble arms, instead of a book telling me how to get muscles, I was greeted by a pile of leaflets explaining that I needed to send off another, much larger, postal order to buy the book telling me how to get bigger muscles. Then, as luck would have it, before I could stuff the information pack into the bin, my big brother walked into my room. Catching sight of the incriminating documents, he grabbed them, quickly scanned them and began to laugh. He seemed unable to stop laughing, in fact, and this attracted my mother into my bedroom, too. When she arrived, Mammy lifted up the pack and then began to laugh too. Finally, hearing all the hilarity from downstairs, my father and wee brother joined us and before very long, there they all were in my bedroom: my whole family, laughing hysterically like the Martian robots on the Smash advert on the TV. Not even the thick woodchip on my bedroom walls could absorb the sound of their hysterical laughter.