Stone Kingdoms (9 page)

‘That's true, Miss – do you remember the day you were looking for Axl Rose?' We both laugh at the memory and then I get down off the chair and hand him the brush. He takes off his blazer and starts to paint the bits I've missed with deft, sweeping strokes, and as he works I tell him my mother's story about being knocked down by the American tourist. Then he tells me about a family he knows who go around looking for cracked pavements so they can fall over them and sue the council. Before long the boards are almost finished; sudden
sunlight
rakes the room, lighting up the brush strokes and the glint of staples I wasn't able to pull out, the redness of his hair.

‘Why did your parents send you to this school, Daniel?'

He stands with his back to me, surveying the finished work.

‘To spite the priest. Me da did it to spite the priest,' he says as he turns to look at me. He hesitates, then finger-prints green paint across the headlines of one of the papers. ‘I told you I'd a brother in the Kesh; well, I've another brother in Milltown. He was shot by the Brits. I was ten when he died. He was called Sean. The priest wouldn't let the coffin come in the chapel grounds with the flag and gloves and stuff on it. He and me da stood arguing on the steps for about five minutes. I thought me da was going to deck him. Afterwards he never went back, even though me ma begs him every other day. So he sent me here because he knew it would get up their noses.'

‘Your family's had a hard time.'

‘Not as bad as some,' and the sudden defensiveness in his voice tells me he doesn't want my sympathy. In my confusion I reach out to touch the boards as if to see if the paint is dry, and leave an imprint of my fingertips. He shakes his head in pretend exasperation and brushes out the marks.

‘What's the point, anyway, of painting these boards when you're only going to stick things all over them and in the end you won't even be able to see them?'

I smile and push hair out of my eyes. ‘Maybe life won't always be like this, Daniel. Maybe there's good things waiting out there in the future.'

He looks at me as if I'm a child who's just said something incredibly stupid, goes to say something in reply then stops himself.

‘When you're a big-shot businessman in America, would you give me a job as a painter?'

‘No way,' he says. ‘You've got more paint on your hair than the boards.'

As he stretches out to touch my hair I start away a little. His
hand
drops, he shakes his head with a smile and then he is gone. I look at the mark of his hand on the newspaper. I kneel down in the empty room and match my hand with its print.

‘Why did you come to Africa, Naomi?'

How can I start to explain? How can he understand? I would have to begin with a feeling, a feeling which belongs in a city I once thought of as home. It is a sense that we are slipping closer to the abyss, that with each new atrocity comes the frightened knowledge that all semblance of restraint, of the accepted parameters of barbarity, has gone, and that there is nothing to stop us slipping over the edge.

Two days after Michael Stone attacks the mourners at the funeral of the IRA unit shot in Gibraltar I pass a paint-daubed wall. ‘It only takes one Stone to kill three Taigs', it says. Soon the same celebratory slogan is everywhere and suddenly it feels as if we are spiralling out of control, no longer just some monotonous side-show, each new burst of savagery reaching out to taint any life it chooses. The whole city tenses, the tight little lines of streets I pass each day, spokes on a wheel which rolls inexorably towards its fate. As always it is unspoken, but you feel it in your stomach, see it in the eyes of the policeman who checks your licence, hear it in the staff-room conversations which avoid its every mention. And always the hovering helicopter, watching, waiting, the sound of its engine throbbing at first like a migraine, then gradually absorbed into the consciousness until it is no longer heard.

It is three days after the Milltown attack and Kevin Brady, an IRA man killed by Stone, is to be buried in the same cemetery. The IRA is wary of a repeat attack and from early morning their men patrol and search the cemetery, look under cars on the funeral route, guard the streets around St Agnes' church on the Andersontown Road. Young men huddle on street corners, shelter in shop doorways, their eyes spearing each passing car
with
suspicion. Stewards, puffed up with self-importance, talk into two-way radios. Women and children are conspicuous by their absence. Veiled faces peer from behind curtains, others watch from their doorsteps. Soon the shops will close as cars and vans unload the world's press to join the crowds making their way to the church. When the coffin comes out, the leather gloves and beret are placed on top and the cortege moves slowly to Milltown, thousands of mourners behind, and in front a phalanx of black taxis. Above, the helicopter treads air. Can you see it, Basif? Can you hear the throb and whirr of its engine? I feel the sun stir the burnt parts of my skin and I move my head to find new shade. The chanting of the children grows shrill as Nadra's voice urges them to ever greater efforts.

Suddenly a silver-coloured car appears as if from nowhere, heading at first towards the cortege. It brakes, turns, ricocheting from blocked-off exits, desperately seeking an escape. As it reverses, it finds itself hemmed in by black taxis and as it slithers to a stop the crowd breaks forward and surrounds it, pulling at the locked doors. There are two men in the car. I sit in my flat, the week's shopping spilling out of plastic bags round my feet, and watch it on television. All across the country we sit at home over lunch, in bars and clubs, watch as the crowd round the car grows. Twenty, thirty, forty men, kicking at the doors, banging at the windows with wheel braces. And as they swarm over it a man climbs on the roof and swings an iron bar again and again at the windscreen. You feel the terror of the two men inside as the car is engulfed by screaming, contorted faces and you want to shout, to try to stop what you know has already happened, but there is only the silent, sickening fascination, and so I sit with bags of groceries slouching their contents across the floor and watch.

The crowd is driven by its own collective frenzy; hungry, atavistic, each man outdoing the other, and suddenly I think it is a film and everything will be all right. But then one of the men is twisting himself out of a window and firing a warning shot in
the
air but all the fear is in the car and it is too late to stop what you always knew was going to happen, as the two men are trailed out of the car and vanish in a flail of fists and feet. They don't show any more on television. Only the helicopter sees it all, its cameras flicking the image on to screens in darkened rooms where uniformed men huddle together, watching as the IRA take over and drag the two men towards Casement Park. Watch the screens, Basif, push your way into the huddle. Come, stand beside me and watch as the men are beaten again, interrogated and stripped. See the crowd milling outside the closed gate as only the chosen few are admitted to watch, to lend a fist or a boot. Come with me, Basif, as we hover in the sky, become the unblinking eye of the camera.

See the semi-conscious bodies thrown over the wall of Casement Park and taken in a black taxi where they are beaten again, follow it to waste ground close by where the summoned gunman appears and shoots one of the soldiers in the head, for yes, they are soldiers, and so required to die. See one of them struggle, for the final time, before he, too, is finished off. Hear the young man leaving the scene say to the arriving journalist, ‘Short and sweet, good enough for him.' Look too, Basif, as a priest arrives and kneels beside the stripped body and gives the last rites, tries to administer the kiss of life to a bloody mouth. An old woman appears and places her coat over the head of one of the dead soldiers. Listen to what she says: ‘He's somebody's son. God have mercy on him.'

But there is no mercy, and they show it again and again until it runs silently and perpetually in the head. I kneel on the kitchen floor and pack groceries on to fridge shelves, a feeling of sickness adding its own score to the images. Later we will distance ourselves with ritual condemnation, try to expiate our communal guilt with explanation, but for the moment there is no absolution. I take an empty polythene bag and clear out the half-used, wasted food that always litters the fridge, mop out the spreading puddle of water which forms on the bottom
shelf.
My hand shakes a little, Basif, for there is something else I have seen, something which I would have to tell you if I were to answer your question.

It is a face, Basif. It is a face I love. The first time I watched, I saw only the crowd. The second time I see the faces, but even then I tell myself I am mistaken. Something makes me flick to another channel and I record the news on video, play it back, freeze-frame, then release to the moment when the camera angles into three men breaking the glass at the back of the car. But one of them is not a man. One of them is a boy. A boy whose face I know. He is climbing on the boot of the car and his hand holds something I can't see but as his arm becomes a swinging arc the camera moves to another focus and he is gone again. I turn the pictures off, listen to the hum of the fridge, the sound of traffic outside, as an emptiness opens up inside me, and then into the emptiness flows an overwhelming sense of my own futility. I do not cry for the soldiers, Basif, I do not even cry for Daniel, I cry for myself and in self-pity I hug my own misery, force myself to finger each of my coldest memories like the bitter beads of some rosary. I stand once more in front of the frosted surface of glass and scan the unbroken band of sky and sea, see the future seep once again into its grey grasp. I try to break free by summoning the memory of my mother standing straight and strong on a pavement, her foot pressed on a ring, but as another crowd of men surges in my head she is powerless to prevent their course, and the glint of gold disappears inside a fist.

Suddenly puffing into my head comes the smell of the church when my father opened it on a Sunday morning. I step inside, look up at the vaulting roof above me as my father's tread scatters the thick layers of silence. Dust paints itself in the trembling light of the stained glass as we walk through the filtering eddies of damp and I feel the coldness brush my skin. And then I see a boy's hand stretched out in the silence to touch the paint in my hair, and he is smiling. But I turn my face away
and
hurry out onto a Belfast street where life flows around me and I melt inconspicuously into its indifference.

I walk quickly, without concern for destination but grateful for the distraction of physical activity. As people pass me I glance at their faces as if half expecting to see some shared acknowledgement of what has happened, but already the immediacy of living has taken precedence and anyway all that can be shared is limited to the common currency of soiled and meaningless words. Experts now at our parallel existence, where only personal loss joins the lines. As I walk I try to think, but everything is disjointed and as I look up, a shifting parabola of small birds comes pulsing over the roof tops of the houses in University Square. I walk through the grounds of the University, past the places where I used to study and know with certainty only that I know nothing. A couple of drunks sitting on the steps of the library turn their blown faces towards me as I approach, and then there is a splash of light in the green bottle which is raised in greeting and a broken, discordant attempt at a song.

Overhead a helicopter shreds the sky and I see what the hovering camera cannot see – little pyres of clothing sending up blackened flames of smoke, bruised and broken knuckles being anointed and salved, tissue removed from under fingernails, the clicking of scissors, and in some locked garage a taxi being sluiced out and scrubbed. I wonder where Daniel is and what he's doing. I stretch out my hand and touch the tightened torque of his spine, kneel down beside him in the shop doorway, then see the smile seep through his spreading fingers.

‘I think you bottled it, Miss, when I handed you that shell. You looked scared – a bit the way you did that first day. Suppose that wasn't the best way to start a new job. Were you scared, right enough?'

‘That first day, or when you handed me the shell?'

‘I don't know – both.'

‘
Yes I was scared that first day, very scared. But maybe more scared when it was over than when it was happening. At the end I thought he was going to hit me – I'd've looked good walking into school with a black eye. It was the hate was scary. Did you not feel it?'

‘All I felt was half a dozen Doc Martens kickin' the crap out of me – I didn't have time to think about anything else.'

‘Why do you always pretend to be less than you are? What are you frightened of?'

‘I'm not frightened, Miss, and didn't I take the shell and tell about the time I fell through the ice? It was a better story than yours.'

‘Better than mine, Daniel, but not as true as Sinead's. She was braver than both of us that day.'

‘Maybe, Miss, but so you did bottle it, then?'

‘Yes, I bottled it. Right at the last moment I heard a voice telling me I was a teacher and if I said what was in my head you'd all think I'd cracked up and not trust me.'

He looks at me and when he turns and walks to the back of the room I know that when he turns again to face me it will be to hand me the shell. As I hold it in my hands I finger its ridged whiteness and know there is no escape from the moment, but I no longer want one.

‘There've been many times in my life when I've been frightened – too many times, I think. I grew up in a place I didn't really like and sometimes I thought I would never get away from it, and when I was young I hated the way I looked – my hair especially – and that made it worse. It was like being trapped, and I know it sounds stupid but sometimes it felt as if the sky, the sea, the mountains, were all pressing down on me, suffocating me.' I pause to see if he's laughing but there's not even the trace of a smile and so I stumble on. ‘I suppose, too, what frightened me was the fear that no one would ever love me, that my life would just wither away. And what really frightened me that first day was that it reminded me of
something
I'd seen when I was a child and it was as if it was all happening again.' I stop in sudden consciousness, embarrassed, and rotate the shell in my hands. I try to find an escape in a joke but I can't think of anything to say and only silence flows in the slipstream of my words. Then he stretches out his hand and takes the shell.