On the Brinks Read online

  Our parents, of course, had warned us to steer clear of the store, with its fleas, stench and disease. And even though Sadie’s name was never mentioned, it was implied with subtle innuendo that she had a history as a loose woman. We were naïve to the message, but the dark whispers with their torn curtains of resentment were enough to convert us to her side.

  So most Friday evenings, like moths to a flame, we gathered with jumping fleas and cowardly cats to watch Sadie’s bloody ritual of cutting throats and gutting.

  “Rabbits!” we exclaimed in unison upon first seeing the caged creatures.

  “Hares,” she said, with the voice of a gangster’s moll, cigarette jerking in her mouth.

  “No, rabbits,” we insisted.

  “Hares,” she reiterated, pulling a squealing creature unceremoniously from the cage by the ears. It made the sound a hungry baby makes searching for a nipple: a haunting sound so pitiful it reached to the ghetto of my soul, tattooing it forever.

  She held the struggling creature inches from our mesmerised faces, its whiskers nervously capturing dust motes, making them dancing rhinestones. Then, with sleight-of-hand, from nowhere she produced an evil-looking cutthroat razor and, to our shock – but puerile delight – she slit the animal’s throat, releasing a leaf of blood that covered her fingernails like crimson varnish. Our hands moved instinctively to our own throats, as if feeling the pain.

  As the day progressed, twenty hares met a similar fate. Sadie’s skinning, gutting and curing the hares followed. I recall that we were baffled as to how something dead could be cured.

  The mercuric entrails, slipping through her fingers like crimson sand, were deposited into a tin bucket to be sold to the butcher on York Street for sausages. The dried skins, festooned upon the walls and resembling leaves of tobacco, retained their tiny faces, each adorned with grotesque, posthumous grins. Pity and wonder emoted from the scene.

  And there, amongst the rags and pungent attar of cat piss, we came of age with the knowledge that life is arbitrary to a fickle god, who alone understands the strangeness of birth and death and their seamless, paradoxical partnership.

  “Don’t pay ’em no heed,” Sadie said, watching my eyes skim over the dead. “They’re only animals. Nothin’ more.”

  She took a sip of Mundies from a chipped cup with Made in Hong Kong stencilled in bold blue letters on the bottom. The wine glazed her lips, making them fat and obscene like naked snails.

  “Ye’ll be able to do this one day,” she said, nodding her head sagely.

  Ice formed in my stomach at her words. I knew I could never carry out such a bloody deed.

  “Yes ye will. Yes ye will.” Her slurred voice sounded like a needle stuck in a groove. “Everyone knows it was ye who forced yer dear mother to run away.”

  I ran home, never stopping, my heart banging in my chest and Sadie’s torturous words ringing in my ears. I didn’t sleep that night. Or the next. I vowed never to return to the store. But I’d forgotten: I was a moth and Sadie the flame.

  * * *

  The coolness of evening came. It was time to come down from the roof as the pervasive shadow of autumn bled from summer. But a wave of dread swept over me at the thought of going home. I could hear Dad’s strong and intimidating voice shouting, “Sammy! Where the hell are you? Get home now.”

  Somewhere below, a radio captured Marvin Gaye singing “What’s Going On”. I closed my eyes, squeezing in the night, feeling my lids flicker as if housing angry ants.

  I didn’t want to go home. Not now. Not ever.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Blood On Their Bloody Hands

  30 JANUARY 1972

  What you need is a civil war. Julius Caesar

  A land … where light is as darkness. Job 12:2

  Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. Luke 22:36

  It was about this time that Neal Armstrong made one giant step for mankind, while here in the North, Unionists were taking their usual two steps back for the Empire. Neal claimed there were no moon men up there, and he was right. They were all down here, in the biggest spaceship mankind would ever witness, in a place called Stormont.

  Black people were marching for civil rights in America, and Catholics in the North had the audacity to try and sample some of that pie also. It was around this time that my oldest brother, Danny, purchased a car. Not too many Catholics had cars in those days, so it was the talk of the street. It was a sky-blue Mini, and it was his pride and joy.

  One Sunday, before sunrise, he shook me from a deep sleep. “C’mon, kid. Hurry and get dressed. We’re going.”

  For two weeks he had been promising me a drive in the car, some place special. But I didn’t believe him. I thought he was full of shit. But here I was, squeezing into his tiny car, filled to capacity with three of his mates.

  It was brilliant. I didn’t care where we were going, or that I could hardly breathe through lack of room; just being in the car was heaven.

  When we finally reached our destination many long hours later, he said, “Out, kid. We’re here.”

  “What do you call this place?” I asked, my legs buckling with pins and needles.

  He laughed. “Derry. We’re here to join the march for civil rights.”

  I hadn’t a clue where Derry was, but it sounded magical. I could smell fish and chips in the air, and it made me think of Bangor on a Sunday afternoon. It was 30 January 1972, and little did I – or anyone else – know what a terrible nightmare awaited us. It became the seminal moment in my life, a baptism of fire into the real world of being a nationalist in the North of Ireland.

  The smell of fish and chips was quickly swept away by the stench of CS gas and gunpowder, as British paratroopers began firing on unarmed protesters and marchers. The smell and sound followed us all the way home. On the journey to Derry we couldn’t stop talking, filled with the delight of navigation on wheels, laughing. But the entire journey home was spent in stony silence, as if not talking meant it hadn’t happened.

  My father almost cried, telling us the terrible news as we entered the house. “The British have murdered thirteen innocent people. I thought the two of you were …” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

  My brother said nothing. His silence said it all: there was no way they would get away with it. The world would make justice prevail.

  It was laughable how naïve we were in those days. That same year, a British so-called judge named Widgery exonerated the paratroopers of the murders, and placed the blame on the civil rights marchers, ludicrously stating: ‘There would have been no deaths if there had not been an illegal march.’ Soon, the British media would start re-murdering the victims of that nightmarish day with insinuations that they were gunmen or bombers.

  It would be almost forty years before the filthy lie was firmly nailed to the Union Jack, and the British government was forced to admit what the rest of the world already knew: those murdered were all innocent victims.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Catholic with Protestant Blood? An Explosive Combination!

  Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. HP Lovecraft, The Outsider

  There may be trouble ahead …

  Irving Berlin, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”

  Whenever I visited my cousins in the staunchly loyalist Tiger Bay, I would see tessellated pavements of red, white and blue surrounding their homes, like talismans, chasing away Fenian evil spirits.

  The young girl who lived next-door to my uncle was a couple of years older than me. She was beautiful, and each time I saw her I could never take my eyes from her face.

  “See enough?” she said, catching me watching her one day.

  “I … well … oh …” My face was burning.

  “Why’re ye takin’ a reddener?” she smiled, walking towards me in the street, her gorgeous eyes trapping me.

  I quickly disappeared into the safety of my uncle’s house.

  A
couple of days later I saw her again.

  “What’s yer name?” she asked.

  “Sammy,” I replied, amazed at my courage. “What’s yours?”

  “Judy,” she replied, before walking down the street, out of sight.

  That summer changed my life forever; a summer filled with rushing daylights that banished the misery of a squeaky voice and spotted skin.

  “What kept ye?” Judy said, sitting on a dilapidated swing, sucking on a blood-red ice lolly. “I thought ye’d chickened out.”

  I shouldn’t have come here. It was too far from home. Dad had always warned me, for some arcane reason, to avoid the park. But Judy had gone on and on, calling me a chicken, a mummy’s boy. I had to prove her wrong.

  “That lolly makes you look like you’re wearing lipstick,” I said.

  “So? I do wear lipstick – so there!” She pursed her lips, and to prove her point produced a tube of lipstick from her beat-up jeans and applied it expertly.

  “See?” she said.

  I was shocked as I took the adjacent swing, the rusted chains staining my hands.

  Suddenly, she leaped from her swing and stood facing me. She placed the ice lolly an inch from my startled face.

  “Suck,” she demanded.

  It was mushy with her slobbers. The ice dripping on her fingers looked like melted candle grease. I found it repulsive and jerked my head away. “I … I don’t want any.”

  “Snob!” There was anger in her eyes. Dark, challenging anger.

  “Am not!”

  “Prove it. Suck if ye’re not a snob.”

  I wondered if anyone was watching. “Okay! Okay! Don’t stick it in my gob!”

  I sucked, disgusted with myself, amazed at what I was doing.

  “Ha! Sammy’s wearing lipstick! Sammy’s wearing lipstick!” She circled my swing, singing.

  “You’re crazy, wee girl. Know that?”

  “Judy. My name’s Judy. Say it.”

  “I know your effing name!”

  “Say it. Whisper it. Here. In my ear.” She leaned to me and I could smell Lifebouy soap and Sunsilk shampoo oozing from her.

  “Judy,” I whispered, but not before checking her ear for wax.

  She slowly turned her face and kissed me hard, causing our teeth to clink like early-morning milk bottles. I could taste the ice on her breath.

  “C’mon. Over here.” She pushed me towards the old green hut that functioned as toilet, shelter and storage. Its hoary paint was peeling, revealing initials of lovers long gone. A few yards away, discarded condoms lay guiltily in the grass, pregnant with their owners’ imagination.

  Without warning, she opened her shirt and placed my hand on her breast. It was warm and small, like an egg after a hen goes to feed.

  “I love ye. I’ll always love ye,” she whispered.

  My head was spinning. I never knew things like this existed.

  “Say I love ye,” she said, suddenly coy.

  “I … love you,” I managed to say, my throat dry with anticipation. At that moment, I would have said anything. I would have said Fuck the Pope and God save the Queen. I would have become a traitor for this strange magic that was being weaved on me.

  Unexpectedly, the sound of released water filled the air. We held our breaths as the park ranger made some tea, inside the hut. A colony of dead tealeaves danced in the drain’s vortex of dirty rainwater as the water spouted out.

  “If he spots us, we’re dead,” I whispered.

  “He’s not the only one who’ll kill us.”

  “What’s that suppose to mean?”

  “My da would kill me if he caught me with ye,” whispered Judy, once the silence returned.

  “I know. My da’d kill me if he caught me doing this,” I agreed.

  She laughed softly. “No. Not for this. Because ye’re a Taig.”

  “A what?” I was baffled.

  “A Taig. A Catholic.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with that?”

  She just shook her head. “Nothin’. Just be careful when ye come to our street.”

  Even though I hadn’t a clue what Taig meant, it made me feel dirty, uncomfortable. Later I discovered it was a derogatory term for Catholics, the equivalent of a black person being called “nigger”. It was my first taste of the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, of the real world of sectarian hatred in the North.

  After that, Dad forbade me to visit my cousins, describing them as the dung beetles of the insect world: hating the rose but wallowing in its manure.

  “Catholics are the saucers in the North of Ireland: close to the cup but never allowed to savour its contents,” he said, angrily.

  It was an anger I hoped never to see again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bloody Hell! All The Meat Ye Can Eat!

  For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously. Friedrich Nietzsche

  There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those …

  HP Lovecraft, The Shunned House

  I started work in a timber yard near the docks, as one of about twelve Catholics in a work force of over a hundred. Needless to say, we weren’t given warm welcomes – except near the Glorious Twelfth when, consumed with booze and hatred, our loyalist fellow workers would utilise our tiny, separate tea-hut as a bonfire. If any of us were in it then that was a plus. Not a week went by without some sort of threat being made against us.

  The Twelfth was always the worst, animating tribal animosity and sewing the bones of the dead into a patchwork of biblical absurdity.

  After a few months of walking home backwards for the sake of survival, I decided that life as a joiner was not my calling. I ended up working in an abattoir, a stone’s throw away from the timber yard. A railway track stretched away behind the industrial wasteland where the abattoir stood. On summer days, heat rose off the tracks in crimped patterns that made them look soft and familiar in the baking distance. If someone placed an egg – usually a pilfered seagull’s egg – upon the track’s gnarled metal, the egg would fry perfectly as if on a hot pan.

  In summer, the wasteland had a rough beauty about it. Juniper and sage housed gossiping insects, their orchestral wings perpetually in motion. Clumps of purple and red, white and violet wild flowers burst triumphantly through rusted metal and rotting carcases of dead dogs and cats, making it something that could be tolerated, despite its roughness. In fact, these gritty imperfections gave the industrial wasteland character. There was beauty out there in the rapidly diminishing landscape, something true and necessary and soothing in its quiet reassurance of vastness and power.

  Unlike the abattoir.

  “I don’t know how you can stand that place, Sam,” said Jim Kerr, my old school mate, standing beside me at the intimidating gates of the bloody institution. We hadn’t seen each other since leaving school, almost a year earlier.

  “No choice, have I? You’re lucky. You can fix cars. Wish I had a wee job like yours, working in a garage.”

  “It’s not as great as ye imagine. Covered in oil most of the time. A bit like us when we used to do the art with Miss Smith.”

  The memory made us both smile. We were all in love with Miss Smith, our art teacher at secondary school. She was drop-dead gorgeous, and took no shit from anyone. Perhaps her black belt in judo had something to do with it?

  “Ah, those were the days,” I said.

  “Listen to him, would ye? Talkin’ like an auld man. We only left last year.”

  “Seems forever. Wish to hell I was back, instead of this. I thought it would be great getting away from school, earning some money. What a nightmare, ending up working in the abattoir.”

  “At least you don’t have to worry about getting the crap beat out of ye by some sadistic teacher for being late.”

  “No, just worry about getting the crap beat out of me by loyalists.”

  Suddenly, his voice went all serious. “Listen, Sa
m, be careful in there. Watch yer back. Not too many Catholics.”

  “With a good Protestant name like Sammy Millar, I won’t have any problems.” I grinned.

  “Just be careful. Okay?”

  “Don’t worry, mate. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Don’t get too cocky. I’ll see ye the next time I’m down this way.”

  I watched him slowly disappear out of sight down the long narrow road.

  Taking a deep breath, I walked towards the main entrance. Dove-grey smoke drifted upward from a massive chimney, like a ghost, formless yet controlled, as if the building was a living being, breathing steam. Dull light filtered dimly through frosted glass. The smell of something floated heavily in the air, something at once familiar and strange, and for a very brief moment a specific sensation of everything being unreal hit me. It reminded me of old black-and-white documentaries on concentration camps I had seen on television.

  The abattoir was a gothic conveyor belt of transmogrification: live, bewildered creatures entered at one end, only to emerge naked, humiliated and dismembered at the other. Galvanised by the smell of blood, some, in a futile attempt to escape the inevitable, would leap the barrier, only to break their legs, laying in a mangled, bellowing heap. They would quickly be set upon by angry butchers, who would leave a bloody highway of intricate veins and vestigial nerves strewn everywhere, some still ticking with shock.

  Animals would crane their necks sideways, watching the bloody hands and lethal steel doing their terrifying work. The dismembered bodies were quickly captured on unforgiving ‘S’ hooks, giving the scene a grotesque, Bosch-like madness, populated with the ruddy violins of sheep carcases and cello-shapes of cows. The place was massive and held no boundaries. It was breathtakingly horrible, like the Sistine Chapel bloodied by barbarians, seething with rage in a hideous frenzy of activity. Its dank coldness reeked with tension, void of all things human.