On the Brinks Read online

  We drove down Lake Avenue, towards the beach, in total silence.

  I parked the car behind some sand dunes, and then proceeded to remove a few Buds from the back seat.

  Not too far away from us, a young couple were sitting on a grassy hill, eating greasy sandwiches, watching people on the beach beginning to pack and leave.

  It was late evening but the heat was still horrendous. A fleshy-coloured moon dangled in the late sky, hanging like unsacked testicle. Crickets were making small talk and mosquitoes bit on my ears as I watched calmness come to splintered waves. A seagull hovered effortlessly in the thick air, killing itself laughing. Later, I would remember the albatross in the Ancient Mariner. Much later, I would remember a seagull by the name of Stumpy in Long Kesh prison …

  When we were out of earshot, I quickly came to the point. “How’d you like to make some serious money?”

  “How serious?” he asked, taking a slug of Bud, balancing his words carefully. He remained noncommittal.

  “Maybe a million,” I answered nonchalantly, placing the beer to my lips while watching his reaction.

  The Bud hit the back of his throat, making him cough and splutter.

  “Are you shitting me?” he said, wiping the spillage from his chin.

  “This is our target,” I said, kneeling on the sand, ignoring his question.

  With my finger, I started to draw a deep wound in the sand. Before long, I had sketched the rough layout of a bird’s-eye view of the building in question, a collage of rectangles and squares. I didn’t speak. Even when the waves slowly crept in, erasing my work, I said nothing, waiting for it to disappear.

  “Let’s go,” I eventually said, brushing the sand from my jeans while rays of rolling water embraced the sand, kissing it before retreating like a chased child.

  We began walking along the beach, whispering into each other’s ears like lovers on a first date. An old lady walked by, exercising her dog, her eyes never leaving us. Shaking her head with disgust, she watched us disappear behind sand dunes, as if witnessing some sort of secret, sexual encounter.

  When the time came, I looked back on that eventful day, realising I had been shitting him. It was more than a million. A hell of a lot more.

  American history was about to be made, and I was the one going to pen it …

  PART ONE

  BELFAST BLOODY BELFAST

  I care not. I have been stripped of my clothes and locked in a dirty, empty cell, where I have been starved, beaten, and tortured, and like the lark I fear I may eventually be murdered. But, dare I say it, similar to my little friend, I have the spirit of freedom that cannot be quenched by even the most horrendous treatment. Of course I can be murdered, but while I remain alive, I remain what I am, a political prisoner of war, and no one can change that.

  Bobby Sands

  In Britain, we are often told there is an Irish problem, but the truth is there is a British problem in Ireland. Occupation failed, partition failed, Stormont failed, direct rule failed, strip-searching, plastic bullets and the H-Block failed because they were all designed to retain British rule.

  Tony Benn

  CHAPTER ONE

  The House

  APRIL 1965

  And this also … has been one of the dark places of the earth.

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

  I was born in Belfast and lived in Lancaster Street, a street whose most famous sons included world boxing champion John Joseph “Rinty” Monaghan, and renowned Irish artist John Lavery. Among Lavery’s many famous paintings was that of Kathleen Ní Houlihan on the first Irish Free State bank-notes; his wife, Hazel, was used as the model.

  After moving from his humble abode in the street, it wasn’t too long before Lavery became internationally famous. He moved to London, where he subsequently lent his palatial house at Cromwell Place in South Kensington to the Irish delegation led by Michael Collins during negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. After Collins was killed, Lavery painted a portrait of him, titled Michael Collins, Love of Ireland. This despite rumours that Collins was having an affair with Hazel while staying in London.

  Lavery may well have been good enough company for Collins, but he sure as hell wasn’t good enough for our wee street. We never spoke much of the gifted man, for the simple reason that he committed one of the most unpardonable sins known to us: accepting a knighthood from the British Empire. From a street that would see three-quarters of its male population interned without trial, or sent to Long Kesh by the infamous non-jury show-trials of Diplock, it was easy to understand why.

  Lancaster Street had a history of sectarian riots, dating back as far as anyone could remember. Orange Order mobs, accompanied by the peelers, attacked it frequently, usually leaving gallant defenders of the street wounded or dead. In September 1921, the New York Times reported on page five that: SHOOTING IS RESUMED IN BELFAST STREETS: Boy Dies of Wounds, Making Total Dead 18.

  The street was named after a Quaker school and educational system founded there, but those of us living in the street much preferred the story that it was named after Burt Lancaster, the brilliant American actor whose grandparents originated from Belfast before immigrating to America.

  My mother, Elizabeth, was a workaholic, perpetually scrubbing and cleaning. She always smelt of Daz, bleach and the carbolic soap that stained her hands the colour of raw wounds. While my father, Big Sam, worked as a merchant seaman, she ran a semi-boarding house that contained the grand total of one lodger. She never made a penny from the house and was perpetually in debt because of it. Her purse was testimony to that. It was a working-class purse. Fat. Fat with the pain of pawn tickets and IOU’s. Fat with poverty, like the false swelling bellies of starving children in far-away Africa.

  That night before my father’s departure to sea, they were arguing over her loneliness and his need to be free.

  Silently, I crept to their bedroom door, tapping meekly on it, hoping neither would hear. This was my way of clearing my conscience, the rationalisation of a coward trapped in his own paralysis. The door never opened, and I managed to quickly slither back to bed, relieved, dreading the distorted looks on their faces, knowing they would have hated me for what I knew.

  The next day, I returned home from school with my friend, Jim Kerr. We kicked at an old ball we had found on the way.

  “Will I call for you after supper?” he asked, while heading the ball expertly.

  “I’ll call for you,” I said, dreading the thought of my mate seeing what I knew was waiting for me.

  “Okay. Make sure you call.” He kicked the ball ahead, and rushed after it, probably thinking he was Georgie Best.

  When I entered the house, my mother was sitting on the sofa, smiling strangely to herself. She stood, and then leaned to kiss me, but I pushed her away, betrayed.

  “You’ve been drinking,” I accused. “And after all you said?”

  Her skin always glistened in the dull sunlight as the alcohol rose to the surface, seeping through her pores. She smelt strongly of mints – a smell I came to dread – using the sweets in a vain effort to camouflage the horrible stench of dead leaves that settled heavily on her breath; of brandy in all its degrading cheapness. It never failed to transform her into a mumbling, sobbing wreck.

  “Your father’ll be home next month, Son,” she said, wiping her flour-covered hands nervously on an apron. The apron was covered with windmills and trumpet-headed daffodils swaying in the breeze. “He doesn’t need to know, does he, about the wee bit of drinking?”

  Already her words were coming out slurred. Soon she would start crying, telling me how lonely she was; how my father was to blame, for being away so long at sea.

  I hated her when she was like this. Did she not
know how humiliating it was for me to sneak into the off-license, hoping no one – especially my mates – would spot me? To add insult to injury, the man behind the counter always gave me that knowing, devious wink that said: Your ma’s secret is safe with me, wee Sammy. Don’t you worry your wee head. His words were slippery, like a snail captured by the sun. I would remember him and his sneaky face, years later, even though he no longer existed in this world.

  “You won’t tell your father,” she repeated again, fearful of my silence.

  “Leave me alone,” I said.

  She smiled sadly, attempting another kiss, burning my mouth with the brandy wetness on her lips.

  “Keep away from me! You’re disgusting!” I shouted, pushing her back onto the sofa. “I hate you when you’re like this. I’m telling Dad, when he comes home!”

  But when she sobbed those terrible sounds, her hands covering her face with shame, I knew I would never tell.

  I placed my hands on her head, hoping to soothe her. “Don’t cry, Mum. I won’t tell him.”

  But she couldn’t look at my face; simply wanted me to leave the room. When I did, she continued her mumbling, whispering, “Your father need never know …”

  As time progressed and her mental health deteriorated further, she began picking at the wallpaper with her fingernails, leaving them a bloody mess and the walls devastated like leprosy. Neighbours began to talk about her, about the state of the house.

  It was shortly after that she solved it all, choosing to live in the shadow of the dead in exchange for the debt of the living. And while we slept, the rain against the window filled her head with a reservoir of eerie dreams, easing the pain that had crushed her for years.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Leaving

  MAY 1965

  The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night.

  Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse

  Between the idea, And the reality,

  Between the motion, And the act

  Falls the shadow.

  TS Eliot, The Hollow Men

  As a child, Saturday mornings always attracted me to the local pub, at the bottom of our street on York Street. Outside the pub, crates of empty Guinness bottles were pyramided against the wall, smell fermenting in the early sun. Their contents were gone with last night’s dreams, leaving only a few teardrops of the black stuff glimmering at the bottom of each bottle. Flies, vile and lazy, nestled drunkenly on the bottlenecks, buzzing angrily at their hangovers.

  “Whaddye want?” asked the barman, suddenly appearing at the doorway of the pub, scrubbing brush and bucket in his large, working-class hands.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “Just looking.”

  “Then go look elsewhere.”

  He hated anyone watching him struggle with last night’s vomit. It permeated the ground, staining it like great maps of the world.

  “Not want me to kill the flies for you?” I asked, showing him my Irish News rolled into a peeler’s baton.

  He stared at me for a few seconds, then skyward for divine guidance.

  “Okay … but don’t eat ’em,” he grinned, but I only nodded solemnly and turned to the task of transforming fat-bellied flies into perfect inkblots of death.

  A dog came to watch, but soon became bored, and began chasing itself in an odyssey of arse-sniffing circles, as if fascinated by its own hairy hole.

  Sometimes, if the barman remembered, he brought me a Coke, making me swear to Our Lady that I’d return the empty bottle. I always did, no matter how much I wanted to keep it for target practice in Alexander Street’s derelict houses.

  The dog suddenly began sniffing suspiciously at a dead sparrow on the ground. The bird’s anorexic legs were protruding upwards, like miniature branding irons towards the sky.

  “Can ye hear ’em?” asked the barman as he threw a bucket of steaming hot water and disinfectant about the pub’s entrance. “Well? Can ye?”

  Of course I could hear them. The lexicon of Clockwork Orangemen floating acoustically from Clifton Street, where they had gathered en masse below the pigeon-stained statue of King Billy. From there they would march to the Glorious Field, unfurling their banners of intolerance and hatred, flanked by benign old ladies resplendent in their Union Jack dresses and Fuck The Pope hats.

  As the Orangemen approached the shadow of Saint Patrick’s Church, it was as if they had suddenly become possessed: leaden faces swelling with anticipation; eyes bulging like ping-pong balls, and thick, ruddy necks trafficking with corduroy veins the size of football laces exposing their congenital abhorrence of all things Catholic.

  My father always said that Orangemen were full of sour grapes and whine. It was hard to argue against his logic, because he would know, of course, his father being a leading Orangeman …

  * * *

  My grandfather, Alexander Millar, came from a staunch Protestant family whose loyalty to God and Ulster was never questioned. He marched to the Field every Glorious Twelfth, and no doubt had his eye on becoming Grand Master, with great visions of riding down Clifton Street atop a white horse like his hero, King Billy, long hair cascading like singer, Tiny Tim.

  He was one of the first to sign the Ulster Covenant, at City Hall, 28 September 1912, protesting against Home Rule. Over half a million men and women signed the Ulster Covenant, and the parallel Declaration.

  It was rumoured he signed it in his own blood. Unfortunately, that’s all it was – a rumour. Contrary to all the urban legends surrounding the signing of the Ulster Covenant, only one signature was ever dipped in blood, that of Frederick Hugh Crawford, who was to become the Ulster Volunteers’ Director of Ordnance.

  Because of his strong Protestant beliefs, Catholics meant little to my grandfather. Their strange beliefs and customs were difficult to comprehend. They were an invisible people. There, but not really there; moving, but going nowhere. He believed the dogma that Catholics in the North had only themselves to blame for their dire situations of abject poverty and unemployment, and that, perhaps, they didn’t really want to work. They bred too quickly, also, and didn’t believe in controlling their sexual urges – or at least using conventional methods to mitigate their effects.

  At the Somme, he was badly wounded, and received three medals for bravery. Tragically, however, two of his brothers were to die on the same bloody field in France, fighting for an empire I would later fight against.

  Despite his Orange Order credentials, he didn’t hate Catholics, but he certainly had no love for them. He was a very tolerant person, my grandfather. As long as Catholics knew their place and didn’t bother him, things would be fine. That was until he actually met a Catholic and committed the ultimate crime of falling in love with one.

  My grandmother, Elizabeth O’Neill, was a Catholic, from the South. A fiery woman, she took nonsense from not a soul – including her soon-to-be husband.

  Elizabeth quickly established the law the first time Alexander proposed to her: “Any children that God may bless us with, will all be brought up Catholics.” No ifs, ands or buts. “If you don’t like it, end this right now.”

  Had he ended it there and then, of course, my life would no doubt have taken a different course. Instead, he decided if not to actually become a Catholic, to at least help them on their way, by fathering almost a dozen little Millars, outdoing “The Waltons” by at least two.

  Most of the children gave Elizabeth or Alexander little or no trouble, with the exception of son, Danny. It was rumoured that he had left home secretly to become a priest, rather than offend his father by becoming one in Belfast, causing more embarrassment for Alexander’s side of the family. The truth was a bit more complicated, and slightly more interesting. Prior to his leaving, Danny was having an affaire de coeur. Unfortunately, the woman was married. Worse, her husband was a member of the RUC.

  Perhaps Uncle Danny had been watching too many romantic Errol Flynn swashbuckling movies, but in a bold – some wou
ld say foolish – move, he stole the man’s gun and shot him, in the privates and privacy of his own home, which can be quite sore, apparently. Hauled off to jail, court papers state:

  MAGISTRATE MR P.J. O’DONOGHUE R.M. and other MAGISTRATES:

  DANIEL MILLAR of 18 LANCASTER STREET was charged with having on MONDAY in his possession or under his control a WEBLEY REVOLVER and 24 rounds of ammunition with intent to endanger life or enable other persons to do so. He was further accused of having an explosive substance in his possession for an unlawful object and without holding a firearms certificate, and with occasioning actual bodily harm to WILLIAM MELI. DISTRICT INSPECTOR FERRIS prosecuted and MR G. MAGEE defended. DET SERG W.J. McCAPPAN gave evidence that he went to the residence of the accused and told him that he called to see him regarding the shooting incident with a revolver that had occurred between himself and WILLIAM MELI at ALEXANDER STREET on MONDAY. He replied: “I know nothing about it.” On being cautioned he said that he had given it away to a boy, and that he could not give his name, as he lived a long way from LANCASTER STREET. He then requested witness to accompany him to his bedroom where he took the revolver from his suitcase, which was underneath his bed. He handed witness the revolver, which was loaded in six chambers. He also took from the suitcase a box containing nine live revolver cartridges and handed them to witness also. When charged at GLENRAVEL STREET POLICE STATION, accused said that: “I did not mean to do any harm with the revolver – it was just a practical joke.” WILLIAM MELI said he knew of no reason why the accused should do him any injury. DANIEL MILLAR was released on bail for a week, and told to report to GLENRAVEL STREET POLICE STATION.

  It was practically unheard of for a Catholic to have bail granted for such serious charges in the sectarian satellite, but granted it was. Some people said my grandfather reached out to old friends in the Orange Order, asking them to persuade the judge to grant bail. Some say William Meli dropped the charges, fearing a scandal and becoming a laughing stock for being shot in that most private of places. Whatever the reason, money was raised, and within that week of freedom, Uncle Danny disappeared from the land of Ireland forever, ending up on the streets of Buenos Aires, where he soon discovered that life really is a box of chocolates. Life suddenly got a lot sweeter for Danny, when he married into one of the wealthiest families in Argentina, makers of fine chocolate.