The Street and other stories (6 page)

I did as he directed. Already the whiskey was beginning to drip into the bucket.

“That’s an old trick,” Geordie explained as we continued our journey. He was still in bad humour and maybe even a little embarrassed about the whiskey, which continued to dribble into the bucket between my feet on the floor. “The cardboard acts as a filter and stops any glass from getting through. Anyway, it’s Christmas and Paddy isn’t the only one who can enjoy himself,” he concluded as we took the side road at Glassdrummond and commenced the climb up to the Silent Valley.

The view that awaited us was indeed breathtaking, as we came suddenly upon the deep mountain valley with its massive dam and huge expanse of water surrounded by rugged mountains and skirted by a picturesque stretch of road.

“Well, Paddy was right about this bit anyway,” Geordie conceded as he parked the van and we got out for a better view. “It’s a pity we didn’t take a camera with us,” he said. “It’s gorgeous here. Give’s the bucket and two of them glasses.”

He filled the two glasses and handed me one.

“Don’t mind me, our kid. I’m not at myself. Here’s to a good Christmas.”

That was the first time I drank whiskey. I didn’t want to offend Geordie again by refusing, but I might as well have for I put my foot in it anyway the next minute. He was gazing reflectively up the valley, quaffing his drink with relish while I sipped timorously on mine.

“Do you not think you’re drinking too much to be driving?” I asked.

He exploded.

“Look, son, I’ve stuck you for a few weeks now, and I never told you once how to conduct your affairs; not once. You’ve gabbled
on at me all week about every bloody thing under the sun and today to make matters worse you and that oul’ degenerate that I was stupid enough to give a lift to, you and him tried to coerce me and talked about me in your stupid language, and now you’re complaining about my drinking. When you started as my helper I didn’t think I’d have to take the pledge
and
join the fuckin’ rebels as well. Give my head peace, would you, wee lad; for the love and honour of God, give’s a bloody break!”

His angry voice skimmed across the water and bounced back at us off the side of the mountains. I could feel the blood rushing to my own head as the whiskey and Geordie’s words registered in my brain.

“Who the hell do you think you are, eh?” I shouted at him, and my voice clashed with the echo of his as they collided across the still waters.

“Who do I think I am? Who do you think you are is more like it,” he snapped back, “with all your bright ideas about history and language and all that crap. You and that oul’ eejit Paddy are pups from the same Fenian litter, but you remember one thing, young fella-me-lad, youse may have the music and songs and history and even the bloody mountains, but we’ve got everything else; you remember that!”

His outburst caught me by surprise.

“All that is yours as well, Geordie. We don’t keep it from you. It’s you that rejects it all. It doesn’t reject you. It’s not ours to give or take. You were born here same as me.”

“I don’t need you to tell me what’s mine. I know what’s mine. I know where I was born. You can keep all your emotional crap. Like I said, we’ve got all the rest.”

“Who’s we, Geordie? Eh? Who’s we? The bloody English queen or Lord bloody Terence O’Neill, or Chi Chi, the dodo that’s in charge now? Is that who we is? You’ve got all the rest! Is that right, Geordie? That’s shit and you know it.”

I grabbed him by the arm and spun him round to face me. For a minute I thought he was going to hit me. I was ready for him.
But he said nothing as we stood glaring at each other.

“You’ve got fuck all, Geordie,” I told him. “Fuck all except a two-bedroomed house in Urney Street and an identity crisis.”

He turned away from me and hurled his glass into the darkening distance.

“This’ll nivver be Silent Valley again, not after we’re finished with it,” he laughed heavily. “I’m an Orangeman, Joe. That’s what I am. It’s what my da was. I don’t agree with everything here. My da wouldn’t even talk to a Papist, nivver mind drink or work with one. When I was listening to Paddy I could see why. That’s what all this civil rights rubbish is about as well. Well, I don’t mind people having their civil rights. That’s fair enough. But you know and I know if it wasn’t that it would be something else. I’m easy come, easy go. There’d be no trouble if everybody else was the same.”

I had quietened down also by now.

“But people need their rights,” I said.

“Amn’t I only after saying that!” he challenged me.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” I retorted.

“Me?” he laughed. “Now I know your head’s cut! I’m going to do exactly nothing about it! There are a few things that make me different from you. We’ve a lot in common, I grant you that, but we’re different also, and one of the differences is that after Christmas I’ll have a job and you won’t, and I intend to keep it. And more importantly, I intend to stay alive to do it.”

“Well, that’s straight enough and there’s no answer to that,” I mused, sipping the last of my whiskey.

Geordie laughed at me.

“Typical Fenian,” he commented. “I notice you didn’t throw away your drink.”

“What we have we hold.” I took another wee sip and gave him the last of it.

“By the way, seeing we’re talking to each other instead of at each other, there’s no way that our ones, and that includes me, will ever let Dublin rule us.”

The sun was setting and there were a few wee flurries of snow in the air.

“Why not?” I asked.

“’Cos that’s the way it is.”

“What we have we hold?” I repeated. “Only for real.”

“If you like.”

“But you’ve nothing in common with the English. We don’t need them here to rule us. We can do a better job ourselves. They don’t care about the Unionists. You go there and they treat you like a Paddy just like me. What do you do with all your loyalty then? You’re Irish. Why not claim that and we’ll all govern Dublin.”

“I’m British!”

“So am I,” I exclaimed. “Under duress ’cos I was born in this state. We’re both British subjects but we’re Irishmen. Who do you support in the rugby? Ireland, I bet! Or international soccer? The same! All your instincts and roots and…” I waved my arms around at the dusky mountains in frustration “… surroundings are Irish. This is fucking Ireland. It’s County Down, not Sussex or Suffolk or Yorkshire. It’s us and we’re it!” I shouted.

“Now you’re getting excited again. You shouldn’t drink whiskey,” Geordie teased me. “It’s time we were going. C’mon; I surrender.”

On the way down to Newcastle I drank the whiskey that was left in the bucket. We had only one call to make, so when I asked him to, Geordie dropped me at the beach. I stood watching as the van drove off and thought that perhaps he wouldn’t return for me. It was dark by now. As I walked along the strand the snow started in earnest. Slieve Donard was but a hulking shadow behind me. I couldn’t see it. Here I was in Newcastle, on the beach. On my own, in the dark. Drunk. On Christmas Eve. Waiting for a bloody Orangeman to come back for me so that I could go home.

The snow was lying momentarily on the sand, and the water rushing in to meet it looked strange in the moonlight as it and the sand and the snow merged. I was suddenly exhilarated by my
involvement with all these elements, and as I crunched the sand and snow beneath my feet and the flakes swirled around me, my earlier frustrations disappeared. Then I chuckled aloud at the irony of it all.

The headlights of the van caught me in their glare. My Orangeman had returned.

“You’re soaked, you bloody eejit,” he complained when I climbed into the van again.

He, too, was in better form. As we drove home it was as if we had never had a row. We had a sing-song—mostly carols with some Beatles numbers—and the both of us stayed well clear of any contentious verses. On the way through the Belfast suburbs Geordie sang what we called “our song”.

We went in for a last drink after we’d clocked out at the store, but by this time my head was thumping and I just wanted to go home.

As we walked back to the van Geordie shook my hand warmly.

“Thanks, kid. I’ve learned a lot this last week or so, and not just about County Down. You’re dead on, son,” he smiled, “for a Fenian. Good luck to you anyway, oul’ hand, in all that you do, but just remember, our kid, I love this place as much as you do.”

“I know,” I said. “I learned that much at least.”

He dropped me off at Divis Street and drove off waving, on across the Falls towards the Shankill. I walked up to the Falls. That was the last I saw of Geordie Mayne. I hope he has survived the last twenty years and that he’ll survive the next twenty as well.

I hope we’ll meet again in better times. He wasn’t such a bad fella, for an Orangeman.

Seamus had become institutionalised. He had been serving terms of twelve months, or six months, or three months in Belfast Prison for as long as he or anyone else could remember. It had gone on for so long now that he had forgotten how to cope with even the simplest realities of life outside. Three meals a day, a bed in a cell and the absence of decision-making on any issue, from going to the toilet to what to eat, had made Seamus into a passive, if likeable, human zombie.

Every time he finished one sentence, back he came again within a week or so, to do time for some equally trivial offence. His family, who were both well-to-do and well-respected, were embarrassed by his behaviour. Once they even sent him from the family home in Armagh to Belfast for examination by a psychiatrist. Seamus, for his part, was so disturbed by this experience that he stole the psychiatrist’s car and promptly ended back in the relative safety of Belfast Prison again.

That’s when I met him. I was on remand at the time he returned to his old job as orderly in A Wing. He used to “bump out” the wing three times a day, and when I was on my way from my cell on the bottom landing or sitting in it during lock-up, I used to see or hear Seamus “bumping” his way up and down the well-polished floor. “Bumping” meant polishing the tiles which stretched a hundred yards from the “circle” up to the end of the wing, and Seamus had been doing it for so long that he now took a certain pride in the dull red glow which was produced by his endless to-ing and fro-ing. He used a bumper, which is like a brush but bigger, with a wooden box where the brush-head should be. The box was weighted down with bricks and its base covered with blankets. It
was heavy and tedious work pushing and pulling this contraption over the tiles, all the time trying to coax a shine from them. Seamus didn’t seem to mind. The screws didn’t really bother him except when they wanted their tea made or some menial task performed. When they did require his services, he complied with a slow yet unhesitating obedience. Sometimes one or two of the nastier ones would poke fun at him, but he was so much a part of the place that everyone usually took him for granted.

On Sundays, during mass in the prison chapel when the political and the ordinary prisoners came together, we would pass him cigarettes, and at night when we were locked up and he was still bumping up and down the silent, deserted wing, we would slip newspapers under our cell doors for him.

He was always extremely cautious about associating too openly with us. We were fairly rebellious, holding parades in the prison yard, segregating ourselves from loyalist prisoners and dealing with the prison administration only through our elected OC. We were continuously on punishment, being subjected to loss of privileges and petty restrictions.

As he bumped back and forth, Seamus was a silent, indifferent observer of the daily battles between us and the screws. Or so, at least, it appeared to us. Then one day a screw spilled a bucket of dirty water over Seamus’s clean floor.

“If you don’t keep this place cleaner than that,” the screw guldered, “I’ll have you moved to the base.”

Seamus looked at him in dumb disbelief and then, with tears trickling slowly down his face, he went on his hands and knees at the screw’s feet to mop up the water which was spreading like a grey blemish over his floor. The screw was a new one, and that incident was only the first of many. It got so bad subsequently that poor Seamus was even afraid to accept our cigarettes, and we found the newspapers which we slipped into the hall for him still lying there when we slopped out the following morning.

There wasn’t much we could do about it. We willed Seamus to resist, and our OC went as far as to make a complaint about the
screw, whom we all spontaneously ostracised. But we were beginning also to despise Seamus for showing no signs of fighting back, and in his own way he seemed to be blaming us for his troubles.

And then Seamus rebelled. I was coming from the toilet at the time. He stood only a few yards from me, bumper at hand, looking at a group of screws loitering outside the dining hall.

“Fuck youse!” he screamed, his words echoing along the wing and up along the tiers of the high glass ceiling.

“Fuck youse!” he screamed again. “Youse think youse are somebody, ordering me about. And you,” he rounded on me with a vengeance. “Fuck you, too, and your cigarettes and your stupid bloody newspapers. I’m sick of youse all and your awful bloody floor.”

At that the wing exploded into noise, with prisoners banging their cell doors, rattling the bars and generally making a hectic, frantic and frightening clamour.

“Tell them to bangle their floor, Seamus.”

“C’mon, Seamus, let it all out.”

The screws, caught unaware by the suddenness and the ferocity of the din, moved hesitantly out of the wing and into the circle. There, safe behind the heavily barred gates, they looked up towards where Seamus and I stood, unescorted and alone, in the middle of the wing. The closed cell doors stared blankly at us, the floor stretched sullenly to meet the prison walls, and the noise continued unabated from all sides. Down at the circle the screws had drawn their batons, and one of them was phoning for assistance.

“Shit,” said Seamus to me, a slow, sheepish grin creeping across his face as he surveyed the scene and heard the shouts of encouragement ringing out from all quarters.

“Ah, c’mon,” I said, glancing nervously at the circle where reinforcements had begun to arrive. “We better go down there and let them quare fellas know there’s nothing wrong.” I had to shout to be heard above the continuing noise. “If this keeps up they’ll think it’s a breakout, and you and me’ll be murdered.”

Seamus ignored me and sat back on his bumper. He took a
crumpled roll-up from behind his ear and lit it, slowly and defiantly exhaling the smoke towards the circle.

“I’ve only a week to do anyway,” he muttered. “Sit down and take it easy. We’ll go when I’m ready.”

And so we did, he to the punishment block and me back to my cell.

He didn’t appear back on the wing for a few days after that, but the screws told us that he was okay and for what that was worth we were content enough. A new orderly came to bump the wing and life returned to its monotonous normality. Then, on a Thursday, Seamus returned: we greeted him with a shouted, uproarious welcome. The screws didn’t seem to mind. He was due for release anyway the following day and there was little they could do about it.

That night, after lock-up, a muffled knock brought me to the cell door. I peered through the narrow chink between the heavy door and the door frame.

“Do you want a cup of tea?” Seamus hissed in at me. “Hurry up if you do.”

I grabbed my mug, delighted at the thought of such an unexpected luxury, and hissed back at him: “How’re you going to get the tea in here?”

“Shut up,” he ordered. “Houl’ your mug up to the chink.”

I did as I was told and smiled to myself as the end of a folded newspaper appeared through the narrow gap.

“Widen out the end of the paper and houl’ your mug below it.”

As I did so a trickle of strong, hot tea poured down the funnel-like folds of the newspaper into my waiting mug.

“Enjoy that,” said Seamus. “There’s no bromide in it.” He withdrew his tea-sodden paper.

“I’ve more for some of the other lads, but I’ll have to hurry up before the screws come back.” He hesitated for a second. “I’m sorry for giving off the other day. You know the score yourself: I was doing heavy whack. Anyway, I won’t be back here again,” he added with feeling, “so good luck.”

“Good luck, Seamus,” I whispered.

He moved from the door, then turned back again. Through the chink I could see his lips widen into a grin.

“Up the rebels,” he smiled.

That was the last I saw of him. I was released myself a few months later and I forgot about Seamus. That is, until this morning, when his photograph stared out at me from the front page of the
Irish News
.

Twenty-nine-year-old Co. Armagh man shot dead after crashing through a British army roadblock in a stolen car.

At least he never did go back there again, I thought to myself. But you never know. Maybe he was on his way back when he was killed? Probably not though. Whatever institutionalised refuge Belfast Prison held for him had been lost during his last stay there. They’d never let him bump out A Wing floor again after his last outburst. We’d made sure of that.

No, he probably knew what he was doing when he crashed that roadblock.

What was it he had said to me that night he gave me the tea? Up the rebels?

“Aye, Seamus, up the rebels.”