So It Is E-Book

Liam Murray Bell

• Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Spanning the decades that saw Northern Ireland move from brutal conflict to uncertain peace in the 1990s, this powerful new take on the literature of the Troubles is both a political coming-of-age novel and a fast-paced literary thriller. Aoife, a young girl growing up in 1980s Belfast, finds herself the last line of defence between the violence and her family. While her mother sinks deeper into a medicated stupor, and her father leaves the family for the comforts of the local bars, Aoife cares for her brother Damien, trying to keep him out of harm's way, while all around her friends and neighbours are swept up in the conflict. Meanwhile Cassie, a Republican paramilitary and honeytrap, lures and seduces her victims, inflicting lasting damage. But her infamous tacti have their repercussions, and before long her past catches up with her. So It Is is an unflinching and suspenseful debut that reflects the factions and fractures of the Troubles from a new perspective, culminating in a breathless sequence in which the choice between violence and personal morality becomes shockingly acute.

Leseprobe

In memory of A.M.

Contents

Title PageDedicationBook One1234567891011Book Two12131415161718192021AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyrightAdvertisement

Book One

1

Iwait for Whitey in the Regal Bar, sipping at a tonic water. Typical Loyalist hole, the Regal is, with portraits of the Queen and Norman Whiteside side by side on the walls. Usual crowd in too: stubbled heads, rolled necks, beer guts, tattoos. It takes two hours for Whitey to arrive, with his friends, and take the corner table. They’re all nudges and winks, seeing the ride at the bar with the short skirt. He’s not sure whether to take it serious or treat it all as a great geg.

‘Can I buy you your next one?’ he asks, as he approaches the bar.

‘Would you be having one with me?’ turning to him then so as my knees brush against him. He nods and we go to a table. Around the corner, out of sight. I play with his hair and pluck his shirt away from the nape of his neck. He has a tattoo there: a single screw. Inked so as you can see the detail of the thread. I ask him about it, even though I know rightly. His dad was a prison guard, died three years ago, in ’93. I ask him about his job, even though I know that too. He’s an RUC recruit, fresh out of school. I’ve done my homework. He can tell me nothing that I haven’t already found out. I’ve scouted out the whole area. A man walking about around here with a sports bag over his shoulder would be pulled to the side. Not me, though. A woman’s inconspicuous. Even months after, when someone lands up in hospital, they never suspect the ginger-haired girl who sells jewellery door to door. Why would they? For fivemonths I’ve been calling at Whitey’s house, selling his mother earrings and necklaces. His photo sits on her mantel beside a cracked Charles and Diana wedding plate. I listen to her proud stories of her son. Over tea. Terrible thing, a mother’s love.

‘Get that pint down you and we’ll get you a real drink, eh?’ I says to him. Then I swallow the rest of my own. Leaning over I press my lips against his. Count the seconds – one, two, three. He’ll be my third. Only two I’ve done before this one. Two in just under two years. Plenty of time between. Healing time.

Whitey’s perfect. Eager enough that he’ll not think twice before, green enough that he’ll think twice about telling anyone after. As I stand up, I lift my handbag and the empty miniature tonic bottle.

‘Wait there a minute,’ I say, and make my way to the ladies’.

Aoife’s mammy started to have problems with her mouth in the weeks after Eamonn Kelly was shot by the Brits. It started as a tingle, she told the doctor, like a cold sore forming at the corner of her lip, then it began to scour at her gums as though she was teething. It was when it started to burn, though, like taking a gulp of scalding tea and swilling it around… when it began to feel like the inside of her mouth and throat were nothing more than a raw and bleeding flesh wound… it was only then that Cathy Brennan phoned for the doctor.

In those weeks, as the pain intensified, she’d call Aoife or Damien over to her with a wee wave of the hand and reach into her apron pocket for a five-pence piece. Tucking it into Aoife’s school pinafore or into the torn remnants of Damien’s shirt pocket, she’d send one or the other scampering down the street to McGrath’s on the corner to buy an ice-pop. All different colours, they were. Aoife liked the purple ones best, while Damien liked the green. Neither of them would ever even think to buy the orange ones. They would race home and give it to their mammy, who would clamp it unopened between her thin lips. Lengthways, like the flutes played during the Twelfth parades. She would keep it there, between closed lips and beneath closed eyes, until all the white frost had melted and the inside of it had turned to brightly coloured juice. Then, opening her eyes and letting out a wee sigh, Aoife’s mammy would lift it away from her mouth, snip the end of the plastic with the kitchen scissors and hand it to whichever of her children had run the message. Give it to them so as they could squeeze at the sugary slush with their fingers and suck on the end of it like a babby.

‘How come Mammy needs ice?’ Aoife asked her daddy.

‘Her mouth burns her, love.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s psychoso…’ Shay Brennan lifted his daughter onto his knee, clearing his throat as he did so. ‘It’s all in her mind.’

‘So her mind’s burning her, then?’ Aoife paused, waiting for her daddy’s nod. ‘Why?’

‘It’s what happens, wee girl,’ he whispered, ‘when you go touting to the peelers.’

‘Is that right?’ Aoife asked.

‘Not a word of a lie. It’s what happens when you feel guilty about turning on your friends and neighbours.’

Eamonn Kelly had been a neighbour of the Brennans for as long as Aoife, with all of her eleven years and ten months on this earth, could remember, but as far as she knew he’d never been a friend to either her mammy or her daddy. In fact, she’d have sworn by all that was good and holy that she’d heard her daddy talking of Eamonn as ‘nothing more than Provo scum’ at Mass one Sunday when he was having the craic with Gerry from down the way.

Still, it had fair shook her mammy when the Army raided the house, two doors down, where Eamonn was living. Aoife had seen it as well, even though Cathy had pulled her daughter’s head in against her chest and kept it there with a firm hand. By twisting her neck a wee bit, Aoife had managed to squint out and see the whole thing. She’d seen the soldiers shouldering in the door without so much as a knock, even though Sister Beatrice at school said it was rude not to. She’d seen Eamonn squeezing out of the upstairs window then, as the soldiers crashed and shouted inside, and jumping from the sill – feet-first like Hong Kong Phooey – onto the lawn below. She’d seen him landing, with his right leg part-buckled beneath him, and then springing up and hobbling out the garden gate. She’d seen the Saracen then, from further down the street, speeding down towards Eamonn and she’d heard the shout of ‘Get your hands up, you bastard!’ She’d seen him limp on for a pace with his gacky half-run, and then heard the shot. Then she’d felt her mammy flinch as Eamonn crumpled to the ground.

‘Did you like Eamonn, then, Daddy?’ Aoife asked.

‘Ach –’ he bounced his knee beneath her, so that she felt as though she were on a juddering bus ‘– it’s not that I liked him, love, but he was a member of this community, is all.’

Aoife paused at that, her arm up around his shoulder and her hand nestled in at his neck. She didn’t look him in the eye, as unsure of her footing now as Eamonn had been when he’d left those two footprints – one deep and straight, the other shallow and slanted – in the tiny square lawn, two doors down.

‘Joanne from school said…’ she started. ‘I tell a lie – Joanne’s brother said to her, and she says to me, that Eamonn was making bombs in that house.’

Her daddy shrugged. Aoife felt it up the length of her arm.

‘If he was making bombs, though,’ she continued, her thoughts stumbling on ahead of her, ‘is it not right for Mammy to be telling on him?’

Another shrug and a settling of the bouncing knee. ‘There were other people she could’ve talked to, Aoife,’ her daddy said, ‘if she had worries.’

‘What if the bombs had blown up, but?’

‘Eamonn was being careful, love.’

‘What if –’

‘I’ll tell you this.’ Her daddy lifted her down. ‘These houses we’ve got, all in a row, they’re near enough bomb-proof, so they are. Remember what your mammy told you, when you were wee, about them windows – triple-glazed. As long as you’re under this roof, you’ll be protected rightly, OK?’

Aoife nodded.

‘Besides, a wee girl like you shouldn’t be concerning herself with bombs or any of that there.’ He smiled. ‘You and your mammy both, you’re too fond of the gossip.’

Aoife’s mammy hadn’t even said that much. It wasn’t like she’d come out and gone, ‘That Kelly lad on the other side of Sinead is making bombs for the IRA.’ If she’d said that, then there’d have been cause for all the ructions that had taken place since. Instead, all she’d said was that there was a powerful smell coming out of Eamonn’s house sometimes and that the windows, from time to time, did steam up like the wee window in the kitchen did when the dishes were getting washed after dinner. That was all she said, Aoife’s mammy, and every word of it the truth. Out on the doorstep, as the woman from the social came out from seeing young Sinead O’Brien and her two fatherless children. Aoife had been there, with her shoulder against the door-jamb, watching Damien as he plucked the black and orange striped caterpillars from the bush near the gate and set them down on the windowsill. He collected a brave amount of them, all slithering slowly across the sill and clambering over one another as though they’d a notion to make it to the other side before Damien’s grubby fingers could scoop them up again.

Still, nine days later Eamonn Kelly was spread out across the concrete with his arms splayed out to the sides, as though he was trying to make a snow-angel and hadn’t realised that it was springtime.

‘She works for the Brits,’ Aoife’s daddy had said to her mammy. ‘She’s a Prod and she works for the Brits and she’s from East Belfast. Come on to fuck, Cathy, you know that if you tell them the time of day they’re liable to take the watch from your wrist.’

Aoife wasn’t meant to hear this. She’d been sent upstairs to mind Damien after all the commotion had died down. She’d crept back down the stairs, though, because Damien’s room faced the road. As she sat on his bed and read to him from his Roald Dahl book – about George stirring in a quart of brown gloss paint to change the medicine to the right colour – her eye kept being drawn to the bloodstain, out in the middle of the pavement outside. Further down the road, beside the peelers’ meat wagon, was another patch of liquid. It was as slick as the blood, but darker and with a swirl of colour at its centre.

‘That’s it over and done with, though,’ her daddy continued. ‘Enough with the waterworks. You’re not to be blamed for what that scumbag was up to, Cathy, so don’t be beating yourself up over it.’

He’d looked up then, Aoife’s daddy, and seen her standing in the doorway, staring beyond him at her mammy, who lurched to her feet and felt her way across to the sink, using the worktop as a handrail. Then she set the tap running and twisted her neck in beneath it, making a bucket of her mouth. As the water passed her lips, Aoife could have sworn she heard a sizzle, like the first rasher of bacon hitting a hot frying pan.

Whitey is stocious by the time we leave the Regal. Absolutely full. That’s how I need them, though, so I’ve no complaints. I lead him down Conway Street. Past the UVF mural with two sub-machine-gun-wielding paramilitaries guarding plundered poetry written in black and gold:

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

Hefollows me on down Fifth Street, not noticing that we’ve turned right and right again, not noticing that the flags on the tops of the lampposts are changing. Out onto the Falls Road. We’ve skirted right around the peaceline. Whitey seems happy enough, though. Like a dog following a scent, his eyes on me, his hands grabbing for me and, for the most part, missing. Leadinghim on, past the garden of remembrance. More words in black and gold, but no poetry to them. Lists of the Republican dead.

Whitey stops under the first mural of the Hunger Strikers and mumbles to himself. As though he’s trying to memorise the quote painted on it. Unlikely he’ll remember much of anything from the walk home. He’ll remember the rest of the night, mind. Pain sobers you up quickly. I steer him to the right before the second mural, the one of Bobby Sands MP. Down Sevastopol Street, then Odessa. Doubling back on myself. It was Baldy who set me up with the place. A safe house. Number forty-eight. The house beside has woodchip across the windows, fly-posters plastered on the woodchip and weeds sprouting from the posters. I check the other side, Number fifty. All the lights are out. I don’t want there to be kids in next door when Whitey sets to squealing. That sort of thing can leave a kid shook for life.

‘Whitey, love –’ I step in close, searching his acne-scarred face ‘– are you going to be of any use to me?’ I reach a hand down to check. Something stirs. I smile. ‘Good lad.’

Aoife and Damien were about equal with the ice-pop runs, purple versus green, when the steady supply of five-pence pieces stopped. Aoife made it home first that day, near clattering into her mammy as she slid around the lino-corner into the kitchen. Her mammy was on her knees in front of the fridge. The butter and milk and all were spread out across the floor, giving her enough space to get her head right in. Aoife caught on to what was happening. Rushing forward, she clawed at her mammy’s cardigan until her head came out of the fridge.

‘What are you at, Aoife?’ her mammy asked, a frown on her as though she’d caught Aoife at the biscuits before dinner.

‘You’re looking for a goose!’ Aoife shouted.

‘A goose?’ The frown deepened. ‘What’re you on about?’

‘It was how Big Gerry’s sister committed sue-side.’

‘Suicide.’ The frown disappeared. ‘She’d her head in the oven, love.’

‘And she died, Mammy.’

‘That she did, Aoife.’ She was smiling now. ‘But a fridge wouldn’t do that to you, now.’

‘Well, why did you have your head in there, then?’

‘Because I’m burning up.’

‘You wanting me to run for an ice-pop, then?’

‘No, love.’ Her mammy shook her head. ‘I’ll call for the doctor, maybe.’

Aoife’s daddy had told her about Caoimhe McGreevy – Big Gerry’s sister – one Saturday afternoon when he had the smell of drink on him. She’d had to wrinkle her nose against the whiskey breath. Caoimhe’s husband had been put in Long Kesh prison for planting a bomb down near Newry somewhere, then Caoimhe got herself blocked on the gin and put her head in the oven so as she didn’t have to live the life of a prisoner’s wife.

‘Why’d she put her head in the oven, though, Daddy?’ Aoife had asked.

‘Why?’ Her daddy had thought for a moment, then chuckled. ‘She needed to see if her goose was cooked.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘And was it?’

‘It was, and she passed on up to Heaven, love.’

‘Can a goose do that to you, but?’

‘If it’s cooked, love, then it can. Only if it’s cooked.’

The doctor came during the day when Aoife and Damien were out at school and gave Cathy Brennan a wee white tub of pills that had her name neatly typed across the side. Their daddy warned them not to be touching them, said they were only for mammies and that if Aoife or Damien ate one then they’d find themselves frozen stiff and still, unable to move even their arms and legs.

‘Is that why Mammy takes them?’ Aoife asked. ‘Because she likes ice?’

‘What d’you mean, Aoife?’

‘Like, she says her mouth burns her, so are these pills to cool her down?’

‘Aye, that’s exactly it, so it is. Exactly.’

The pills certainly seemed to work for their mammy, anyway. In the late afternoon, Aoife and Damien would come home from school and run into the kitchen to find her by the sink, with her back to them and her hands plunged up to the wrist in the soapy water. For hours she’d stand, staring out of the wee steamed-up window, moving only to top up the basin from the hot tap every now and then. Aoife reached up to dip her finger in the water once, after it had just been drained and refilled, and it was scaldingly hot. Her mammy’s hands stayed in there, though, getting all folded and wrinkly like her granny’s skin. It seemed to Aoife that her mammy had real problems getting herself to the right temperature: before the pills she’d been roasted and was always trying to cool herself down, and after the pills she was baltic and was constantly trying to warm herself up.

The benefit of having their mammy spending the majority of her time at the sink was that Aoife and Damien found they had free rein. They’d sprint from room to room of the terraced house, playing at chases or hide-and-seek. Damien took to carrying the bow-and-quiver set that he’d been given for his seventh birthday wherever he went and firing the plastic arrows at anything that moved, whether that be the neighbourhood cats in the garden outside or Aoife as she made her way from her bedroom to the bathroom. After her mammy had been taking the pills for a few days, Aoife realised that she could reach up and take the biscuits from the cupboard beside the stove without being noticed. Their daddy was working on a garden out near Hillsborough and wasn’t back at night until darkness had taken control of the streets outside. By the time he trudged in, Aoife and Damien were both tired out and would be sprawled out on the sofa in the living room, watching the telly and nibbling on biscuits. Their mammy would be in the kitchen, her hands deep in the warm water, until her husband put his dirt-stained hands on her hips and walked her, dripping, across to the dining table for dinner. She’d feed herself, and smile vacantly, but there was no conversation from her, and Aoife’s daddy had to steer her away from the kitchen and up the stairs to the bathroom after they’d eaten to make sure that she filled the bath, rather than the sink, for her nightly wash.

The days slid by and the dishes piled up by the side of her mammy’s misused dishwater. The mountain of clothes began to spill over the top of the laundry basket like a saucepan boiling over, and the floor around the telly became littered with biscuit wrappers and mugs of half-finished tea with floating islands of congealing milk in the centre of the brown liquid. Damien came in from school with a mucky blazer and it fell to Aoife to scrub at it with the nailbrush. The newspaper boy came knocking and she had to root through her mammy’s pockets for enough change to pay him with. Her daddy dandered in with the smell of whiskey on him and asked her to wet the tea leaves and put the chip pan on for their dinner. It took all this, and more, for Aoife to grow scunnered of the new way of things.

On the second weekend, after putting on the wash, running out to McGrath’s for the messages, taking the dirty dishes up the stairs to the bathroom sink and scrubbing at the tomato ketchup stain her daddy had left on the sofa after he came in blocked, Aoife stood in the doorway of the kitchen and picked up Damien’s bow-and-quiver from where it lay on the worktop. Stretching out the string, she imagined aiming one of the plastic arrows at her mammy’s back. She imagined pulling it back as far as it would go and then calling out in a loud voice, with an unfamiliar accent, ‘Get your hands up, you bastard!’ She could see her mammy’s head twisting, then, to look over her shoulder as Eamonn had; could hear the twang from the taut string as it was released, a second noise coming just moments after the shout of warning; could see the arms lifting up, raising themselves as Eamonn’s had, suds flying up and around, splattering the lino like blood against concrete.

Instead, she soundlessly set the bow down on the side and leant against the door-jamb to stare at her mammy’s back. The shoulders of Cathy Brennan, either because the water had gone cold or because she had caught the arrow of her daughter’s hatred, shuddered and then were still.

The place is a dive. They always are. Streaks of damp down the walls, single mattress by the radiator in the upstairs bedroom. Bare. With a bottle of whiskey beside it. Like I asked for. I lead Whitey over to the mattress, ease him down, tie his wrists to the radiator, and then clamber on top of him. Lifting the whiskey, I keep him drinking whilst I straddle him. The smell of the alcohol rises like antiseptic.

‘You think I’m a ride, don’t you?’ I breathe, into his ear.

‘Aw, Cass,’ he mumbles, from between thickened lips. ‘Aw, Cassie.’

‘You ever killed a man, Whitey?’ I ask. ‘Or hurt him so as he’ll never recover?’

He looks confused by that, shakes his head. I reach in underneath my skirt and tug my underwear to one side. I can feel the thing inside, shifting as I shift, moving as I move. Waiting, it is, impatiently. As I pull his fly down, he murmurs something about having a packet of rubbers in the pocket of his jeans. He tries to point with his bound hands.

‘I’ve plenty of protection,’ I say. Then I ease my body up, seeking the angle. There’s a whistle and a wheeze coming from him now, he’s fair fit to burst. Like a kettle near boiling point. With a blissful smile spread across his face. He’s drunk as a lord, getting his hole. All is right in the world of Whitey. For now. Just a final movement of my hips, a final positioning, and then I’m ready. I grit my teeth and wait for his thrust. Always wait for the man, just for those few seconds of deadly anticipation.

A sudden, high-pitched screech of pain. He’s squirming and twisting beneath me. I’m not for letting him go, though, not yet. Clamping my thighs, keeping him in. My own teeth settogether with the agony of it. I close my eyes, grind down, and listen as the screams grow louder and sharper. I listen as the hurt and sorrow of it all penetrates through his whiskey-addled confusion. I’m for waiting until his cries crack, until the tears stream, until he’s ready to plead.

2

Aoife wasn’t worried when her daddy didn’t come home. At least, not at first. She waited patiently for the bookie’s shop at the far end of the street to pull its graffiti-scrawled shutters down. No sign of Shay Brennan. Then she watched the clock for closing time at the curry house, nine pm, and at the chip shop, ten pm. She sighed and watched the telly, right through until the wee hours of the morning when even the pubs that stuck a middle finger up to licensing laws and to security concerns would be kicking their staggering regulars out onto the streets of Belfast.

The telly had finished for the night, the national anthem at the close, then a screen of flickering grey static. With the worst swear that her twelve years of experience could come up with, Aoife rose from the sofa and made her way through to the kitchen. Her mammy stood staring out of the window, looking every inch the anxious wife awaiting her husband’s return. Problem was, the window only looked out onto the back garden and the brick wall at the end of it. Nothing more than empty flowerbeds and a golden-yellow crisp packet caught on one of the spikes of the gate.

With a hand on the small of her mammy’s back, Aoife guided her up the stairs to her bedroom, manoeuvred her fully dressed into the bed and tucked the sheets up and over the water-wrinkled hands. Even as she flicked off the light, leaving her mammy lying in the double bed, silent, still, wide-eyed and alone, Aoife wasn’t worried. It wasn’t unheard of, after all, for her daddy to spend the whole night out and about. Unwise perhaps, what with the boys in balaclavas tending to work the night shift, but not unheard of. It was just the first time that he’d done it since her mammy became chained to the sink. Chained to the sink and tuned to the moon.

The next morning, having been up half the night, Aoife found her eyelids leaden and her thoughts hazy. She couldn’t concentrate in the English lesson, and chemistry ended with her nodding head coming perilously close to the blue flame of a Bunsen burner. It was only Joanne that kept her awake.

‘What’s with you?’ Joanne gave her a sharp nudge with the point of her elbow during morning break. ‘Hi, what’s with you, Aoife? You’ve been away in your own wee world all day.’

Aoife shrugged. ‘I’m just tired.’

‘Why? What were you up to last night?’ Joanne’s eyes gleamed in anticipation of some scandal. ‘Did you go round and see that neighbour of yours, that Ciáran Gilday one?’

Aoife shook her head.

‘What, then?’

‘My daddy pulled an all-nighter. Never came home.’

‘So?’

‘I waited up for him. I waited up for him and he never came back.’

‘Why’s that your problem?’

‘He’s my daddy.’

‘Aye, but it’s your mammy who should be up worrying, not you.’

Aoife shook her head, but kept silent. She’d not told anyone, not even Joanne, about the length of time her mammy took with the washing-up. She’d certainly not be telling anyone that her mammy hadn’t noticed the absence of her dinner, much less her husband, the night before.

‘Has he not done it before, Aoife?’ Joanne asked. ‘My daddy has.’

Aoife nodded. ‘This time it’s different, but.’

‘Why’s that? Are the peelers after him or something?’

‘Wise up.’

It was different because her daddy had been supposed to bring the dinner along to them after a swift pint and a fiver bet on the four-fifty at Newmarket. The size of the dinner he brought back to them depended on the fortunes of the horse. If he was lucky then he’d either get them a curry each – with naan bread and poppadoms and all that there – or four cod suppers with a side of peas for those that wanted. If he was unlucky, it was just a portion of curry chip or a plain chip between two with no side orders. Aoife had been confident that they would end up eating a feast.

The gardening work had dried up for Shay in recent months. He still set off in the mornings to look for lawns to mow or flowerbeds to tend, but he was back at lunchtime to see that his wife took a bite to eat and, given that he’d be reminding her of the need to eat dinner in a few hours’ time in any case, he tended to take the afternoon off and sit himself down at the kitchen table with the racing pages so as he could study the odds. As he said, that much research was bound to pay off eventually. It was a sure thing.

Aoife had given Damien two slices of bread with the contents of a bag of crisps between – cheese and onion ones from a yellow bag – to tide him over until their daddy got back. Just a wee snack, like her mammy used to give them, so as he wouldn’t be hungry while he was running around outside with his friends. When Damien had come back in at around seven o’clock, though, and dinner still hadn’t arrived, Aoife had been forced to give her brother a second crisp sandwich. She kept the two heels of the loaf for herself, but didn’t eat them straight away because she could still sniff the promise of vinegar and taste the spice of the coming curry. Her daddy would be back, she decided, but it might be well after Damien’s bedtime by the time he got in.

A couple of hours later, when she went in to kiss Damien goodnight, she heard his stomach rumbling beneath the covers. Her own stomach answered in kind. Neither of them said a word, but as soon as Aoife got downstairs she ate away at the heels of the loaf.

I make my way down the fire escape and out the back lane. The runback. You don’t want to allow time for the shock to flicker into rage. Like with Nigel, my second. I’ve no such problems with Whitey, though. He’s a lamb. I’ve time to ease myself off and straighten my clothes. Time enough, even, to kiss him on the forehead, through the furrows and the sweat, and look him square in the eyes. So as he understands. He just sits there, though, looking down at the ruins of it all.

Baldy is waiting in his black taxi, meter off. Just a nod he gives me, no more, then we speed off. He knows that I’m not for talking. Bog roll on the back seat to soak up the blood. I wedge a fistful into my knickers, but it’s a stopgap. By this stage, I’m needing to get the thing out of me. Baldy takes the long route round to the wash house, avoiding the city centre and Sandy Row. Force of habit, avoiding checkpoints and roadblocks that are no longer there.

There’s a routine to this now, to what I do when I’m safe. No need for thinking, just go through the motions. First it’s closing the door behind me and making sure it’s locked tight. Then it’s stripping down to bare skin. Next, scalding hot water into the bath, and disinfectant. Not much, mind, just a wee slug. I stand there, naked, waiting for the bath to fill. The thing inside shifts and stabs, stings and slits, scrapes and scours. As soon as the water is deep enough to cover my hips when I lie down, I climb in. It needs to be hot enough to near-blister the skin. Lowering myself in, I wait for the familiar agony of disinfectant against torn flesh.

Screwing my eyes shut, I wait for the pain to dull to a throbbing ache. Panting, short gasping breaths. Then I reach down. There’s always some amount of swelling. It’s tender as hell. If I go slowly, though, then I’ll get it out. I always havebefore. The first time was a nightmare, worse than the deed itself, stabbing around like a surgeon with the shakes. I’ve gotten better at it, though. Nice and slow, so the edges don’t snag. The water gets a faint red tint. Then one final pull and it bobs up, loose, to the surface of the water. The broken and jagged neck of a miniature tonic bottle.

‘Listen,’ Joanne said, wrapping an arm around her friend’s shoulders, ‘whenever my mammy’s shattered after a night shift or that, she just has a cup of coffee. You can flavour it with milk and sugar and all so it doesn’t taste stinking.’

Aoife wrinkled her nose. She’d never tasted coffee before; she’d always been given cups of tea or cocoa at home. Still, the prospect of something warm filling her belly until lunchtime was welcome. The only thing she’d been able to find for their breakfast had been a bag of out-of-date currants. A handful of them in the morning hadn’t even made a dent in her hunger.

‘Where would we get coffee from, but?’ Aoife asked.

‘Follow me,’ Joanne replied, lifting her arm and taking Aoife by the hand instead. They made their way, on tiptoe, up the stairs at the back of the Convent. It was morning break and they weren’t meant to be inside the building unless they had some special educational or spiritual reason for being there. Stealing coffee probably wouldn’t count.

For a brief, sickening moment Aoife thought that Joanne was leading her to the staff room on the first floor. There would certainly be coffee, but there would also be more Fathers and Sisters than at Lourdes, and a fair few lay teachers too. If they tried to take the coffee from in there, and they were caught, they’d be put in detention for months. Either that or they’d be excommunicated. Aoife was on the verge of protesting, but then Joanne rounded the stairwell and went on skipping up the steps towards the second floor.

‘Where are we going?’ Aoife asked Joanne’s back. There was no reply. ‘I’m not sure I really need coffee, anyway – I’m quite awake now.’ This was true. The adrenalin had wakened her up rightly.

‘Be quiet, will you? And keep up,’ Joanne hissed.

They crept through a fire door and into the quiet and dusty corridors of the science department. More than any other part of the school, besides the chapel itself, this wing of the building was cluttered with religious iconography. The priests had advised the nuns to place a few relics where they were most needed. There was a crucifix in the wall hollow by the first physics classroom, with the map of the solar system tacked at an angle beside it, and on the windowsill between the two biology classrooms was a statuette of the Virgin Mary, slightly chipped around the base. Pinned above the door of the second chemistry classroom was an image of St Jude. He had an expression of patiently borne pain on his face that the nuns attributed to his position as the patron saint of lost causes but which the girls thought was constipation.

Joanne and Aoife finally stopped beside the photograph of Pope John Paul II. Beside the door to the school’s laboratory.

‘The laboratory’s off-limits, Joanne,’ Aoife whispered.

‘Is it?’ Joanne feigned an expression of shock for a moment, all dropped jaw and widened eyes, and then stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth. ‘Just keep a lookout, will you?’ she said.

‘What if we get caught, but?’

‘Who’s going to catch us?’ Joanne replied. ‘All of them are down there in the staff room and, even if Extra Anchovies were to walk in on us, he’d not know what to do. He’d probably wind up apologising and leaving us to it.’

Without waiting for Aoife’s answer, Joanne reached forward and turned the handle. Aoife shook her head, but didn’t attempt to stop Joanne as she slipped into the room and pulled the door shut behind her.

Extra Anchovies was one of the few young men who worked in the Convent and one of very few who weren’t celibate. He had a permanently haunted look about him, as his gaze flitted about the clusters of schoolgirls that surrounded him. Aoife had heard it told, by the older girls, that you could get near enough anything you wanted out of him if you just stepped in close and maybe brushed your hand up against his chest. That was what she’d heard, anyway.

His nickname had evolved naturally enough. First, he’d been branded with the simple if unoriginal Pizza Face, as a result of his acne. Then this had been changed to Anchovy because of the odd fishy smell that came off his lab coat. The stench was probably due to the chemicals he worked with. In any case, it had become such a strong smell that the girls had felt the need to upgrade his nickname from Anchovy to Extra Anchovies. It was only a matter of time before he became Extra Anchovies with Cheese.

‘Here.’ Joanne reappeared, holding a teaspoon heaped with a mound of instant coffee granules and a light dusting of sugar. ‘This’ll perk you right up.’

‘I’m not eating it raw,’ Aoife protested. ‘What about the water?’

‘You’re the one that doesn’t want to be caught.’ Joanne spilt some of the coffee in her indignation. It scattered across the floor. ‘I’m hardly going to stand there like a muppet waiting for the kettle to boil, am I?’

‘I can’t eat it raw, though.’

‘It’s a delicacy, so it is. Chocolate-covered coffee beans.’

‘There’s no chocolate, but.’

‘Sugar-covered, then.’ Joanne rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘We’ll go down to the bogs after and you can swirl it down with some water from the tap. Honest to God, I never had you down as Lady Muck, Aoife.’

Stung by this, Aoife took the spoon and gulped the granules down in one swallow, like medicine. Her face contorted itself into a grimace. ‘Bloody hell,’ she spat. ‘That’s rotten.’

‘My mammy says only grown-ups like the taste.’ Joanne took the spoon and tucked it into the pocket of her blazer. ‘I’ve a fondness for it myself.’

The rest of that morning passed in a bit of a blur for Aoife. Her right leg set to jiggling uncontrollably beneath the desk and her left arm to twitching out across her workbook. Her fingers folded and refolded the corner of the page until its dog-ear became a concertina. At one point, during double maths, as the girls all sat quietly doing their sums, her leg became so energetic that her knee began to lift the table from the tiled floor. Tap-tap-tap. She didn’t notice at first. Tap-tap. Then she felt the eyes of the entire class on her. Tap-silence.

Mrs Agnew advanced on her, with one eyebrow raised. Aoife had not been doing her maths – that much was obvious from the blank page in front of her. Instead, she’d been sitting there worrying. Not about her daddy, but about Damien. Her wee brother was quiet at the best of times, but he’d barely spoken a word the previous night. Just nods and shakes of the head. Even when she’d given him his two crisp sandwiches, he’d managed to eat away at them without making a single crunching noise. It was miraculous really, a freak of nature. Aoife’s fear was that he’d react to his daddy’s disappearance in the same way as her mammy had reacted to the death of Eamonn Kelly. True, wee Damien wasn’t tall enough to reach the sink, but he could easily stand right there in the kitchen beside his mammy and stare, straight ahead, at the pipes whilst she stared out the window. Then where would Aoife be? A mute for a mammy, a mini-mute for a brother and a daddy who’d not been seen or heard of since he’d left to go and place a bet on the four-fifty at Newmarket.

After a stern telling-off, Aoife made her way towards the canteen for the long-anticipated lunch. She was looking forward to the dinner ladies’ mince and potatoes, with the mince that formed itself into rock-hard balls like raw potatoes and the flaky potatoes that broke apart like mincemeat against your fork. The thought of it made her mouth water.

It seemed like the thought of it had made her nose run too. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and hurried on down the corridor. It was coming thick and fast, though. She looked down at the back of her hand and swore. The word that came out was worse than the one she’d used the night before. It was one of the words Ciáran and the other boys from the estate used loudly and often, but Aoife herself had never dared make use of it until that moment. Swerving across the streams of pupils in the hallway, she pushed her way into the toilet and hung her head over the sink. Two drops of blood fell and began to spread through the rivulets of water that the steadily dripping tap formed on the grey enamel of the basin. A second later another drop followed, then another and another, until her nose began dripping blood faster than the leaky tap dripped water.

With one hand holding her hair back in a ponytail and the other grasping at the smoke-thick air of the bathroom in a vain attempt to reach the paper towels, Aoife began worrying about her daddy. Maybe it was the sight of the blood that did it, or the hunger that gnawed at her stomach. It could even have been the sickening smell of cigarettes coming from the cubicles, or the frustration of knowing that she wasn’t going to be getting any lunch because of the nosebleed. For whatever reason, Aoife began picturing her daddy lying in a ditch somewhere near the border, with a canvas bag over his head. Her daddy with his arm twisted behind him and his eyes glassy after an explosion on a country road. Her daddy lying unconscious in some back alley with his legs broken, bones jutting and blood pooling. Aoife had grown up with the news reports. She knew what happened. Normally it happened far away; normally it was something you heard about and wondered about late at night whenever you heard a dog barking or the distant popping of gunshots or the thud-thud of golf balls driven against the triple-glazed windows from the Loyalist estate on the other side of the train tracks. But who was to say that it hadn’t happened to her daddy? The way it had happened to Eamonn Kelly.

A final image of her daddy limping on for a pace before crumpling to the pavement flashed across the bloodied basin. Aoife blinked it away and then made a desperate lunge for the paper towels. She decided that she might as well try her hand at mitching: she’d stay off school just for that afternoon. After all, it was unlikely that her mammy would answer the phone if the Sisters did decide to call home.

They say you always remember your first time. For me, though, it all passed in a bit of a blur. Too much adrenalin. Too much vodka, maybe. I near enough blacked out by the time we got to the act itself.

Looking back, it was a poorly planned job carried out by a wee girl with more anger than sense. If something had gone wrong, that first time, I’d have been on my own. This was in the days before Baldy. It was just me and the broken glass back then. It wasn’t until after Nigel, my second, that I felt the call for anything more. After Nigel I knew I needed protection.

Anyway, I forget the name of my first now. It’s not important. I’ll call him Billy for handiness’ sake. They’re all Billy at heart. I’ve met him in the city centre, as if by accident, outside the gates to the city hall, and I’ve struck up a conversation. The usual chat: good to be out shopping on a Saturday, shame about the weather, and would you look at them, your tattoos are gorgeous, so they are, Billy. A Loyalist man and proud of it: a Union Jack inked there on his forearm beside a limp-looking leopard and some faded writing that I might have taken offence at if I could have made it out. Being my first, I’ve not given it much thought beyond that. It’s all about appearance at this stage. True, I have a dander around the streets where he lives, sell a bangle here and a pair of earrings there. It’s the search through the computer at the library that seals it though. It’s the article from back in ’92, two years before, in the Newsletter, that names our Billy as one of three Loyalists put away on six-month sentences for ‘crimes of a sectarian nature’. That’s enough for me. I’m ready to afford him the honour of being my first.

They say you remember the wee things – the small details. For me, it’s the shiver of revulsion that creeps through me as he touches my hand. It’s the feeling of being watched, from all corners of the bluenose bar. It’s the dread expectation that at any fucking moment I’ll hear a cry of ‘Taig!’ and find myself being torn to shreds by many pairs of willing hands. It’s the rush of excitement I get as I stand up, slide the glass tonic bottle into my handbag, and make my way to the ladies’. Most of all, though, it’s locking the cubicle door, pulling the flush and bringing the edge of the bottle down against the cistern. It’s the shattering glass showering onto the grimy floor like confetti, leaving the neck of the miniature bottle in my hand, with its newly angled edges glinting. Glinting the way a weapon should.

‘Go you to the shop,’ Aoife told Damien, once he got home, ‘and get a tin of corned beef for our dinner and a couple of bars of chocolate for after.’

‘Ciáran and them boys are waiting outside, but,’ Damien protested.

‘They’ll have to do without you for a while.’

‘That’s not fair.’ His fingers worked at the straps of his schoolbag. ‘Where’s my daddy?’

‘He’s away.’

‘Away where?’

‘Just away.’

‘Can he not get the corned beef and that on his way back?’

Aoife stared her eight-year-old brother down. It was a hard enough task, because there were tears filling the corners of his eyes. She was in no mood to be questioned, though. Having made her way back from the Convent at lunchtime, she had spent the majority of the afternoon peeling spuds. As an Irishwoman, she felt peeling should have been second nature to her, but she seemed to have taken more skin from her knuckles than she had from the potatoes. With every fresh scrape and graze she cursed her daddy all the more bitterly.

‘When’s he coming back, Aoife?’ Damien asked. She was on the verge of scolding him for that, but something stopped her. Wee Damien was a sensitive soul, beneath the bowl-cut and the layers of dirt he seemed to acquire throughout the course of the day. Besides, he still thought of his daddy as this giant of a man: Georgie Best and Elvis Presley rolled into one.

‘Soon,’ Aoife said, eventually, reaching down and smoothing Damien’s hair. He squirmed away from her. ‘Now you go and do as you’re told, OK?’

Damien nodded. Aoife folded the loose change into his hand. She had found it by rooting through her mammy’s purse, her fingers searching right down into the lining and coming up with lint and brown coins. She’d been wanting to get them a decent dinner, maybe a chicken pie from the butcher or something like that there. Even with the twenty-pence piece she’d found down the back of the sofa, though, it had been a mission to scrape up enough for the tin of corned beef and the chocolate bars.

‘Aoife?’ Damien looked back before opening the front door.

‘What?’

‘Why does my mammy never make our dinner any more?’

Aoife’s mouth opened as if to speak, but she could think of nothing to say, nothing that she could tell her wee brother that wouldn’t lead to another question – an unanswerable question. So, instead, she just lifted her hand and impatiently waved him on through the door, then she turned back to the patchily peeled potatoes. The door quietly clicked closed behind him.

Damien was into his fourth year of primary school by that stage. He’d never been the biggest child, but it was beginning to become all the more noticeable. All the boys that lived near them were either older or had taken growth spurts, and he was dwarfed by them. On the football field you’d think the sides were uneven, maybe eight on one team and seven on the other, then you’d see wee Damien emerging from the ruck of legs with the ball and realise that there were eight on each side. Or they’d be playing hurling and the ball would go flying right over his head, only to land perfectly in the hand of some taller boy standing just behind him.

The saving grace, as far as Aoife could tell, was that Damien was often in the company of Ciáran. Her wee brother’s classmates would all happily take the mickey out of him for a bit of craic, but it was never going to go further because Ciáran was older and stronger than them all. True, Ciáran had to be seen to rip it out of wee Damien from time to time, but it was just to keep up appearances.

In any case, Damien seemed to take it all in his stride. In fact, Aoife had never known him to refuse when Ciáran called on him for a game of hurling or a kick of the football. He never refused and he always came in with his white teeth gleaming into a grin through the top-to-toe filth. No, it seemed to Aoife that he was as happy and healthy as an eight-year-old boy should be.

Although, she did worry about the way he chewed on his nails. It seemed like something that a lot of folk did – you even saw adults out and about on the streets of Belfast biting away at their nails as if they too had eaten only a handful of currants for their breakfast – but Damien took nail-biting to a whole new level. At all hours of the day, he’d have one finger or another in at his teeth and he’d be tearing strips off it until it was bare down to the quick. Often he’d contort his head this way and that, to near impossible angles, so as he could get at a loose shard.

Aoife didn’t look in on him while he was sleeping, at night, but she was fairly certain that there’d be sleep-shredding going on, that he’d have his fingers in his mouth like a babby sooking on the thumb. Even whenever he came in from playing outside, when his hands were caked in a second skin of muck and God knew what else besides, he’d still set to eating away at his fingernails. Aoife’s daddy, before he went missing, didn’t pay it a blind bit of notice, maybe because his own fingers were that tobacco-stained that Damien’s looked near-manicured by comparison. Whatever the reason, Aoife had to take it upon herself to, time after time, march wee Damien up the stairs and scrub away at his hands. It was a matter of hygiene, after all.

After a while, though, she became wile annoyed by the constant trudging up and down the stairs and she began just leading her wee brother into the kitchen, lifting him by the waist and letting him plunge his hands into the sink beside his mammy’s hands. The water was there, after all, so it was as well to make use of it. It only took a brief dip in the scalding-hot water and his hands would come out clean enough that he could set to work on what remained of his nails.

‘You didn’t give me enough, Aoife,’ Damien said accusingly, coming into the kitchen with a plastic bag swinging from his wrist. ‘I was short.’

‘I gave you the correct change.’ Aoife frowned. ‘Besides, there wasn’t any more to give you – that was all I could get.’

‘Twenty pence short.’ Damien raised his right middle finger to his mouth and set his teeth to work. The plastic bag went up with his arm, rustling through the silence.

‘Give it,’ Aoife said, after a puzzled pause, snatching the bag from her brother and emptying the contents out onto the kitchen counter. There was one tin of corned beef and three Mars bars. She looked around at Damien. ‘You bought three chocolate bars.’

Damien nodded. By taking the bag from him, Aoife had removed the finger from his mouth, but he had lost no time in replacing it with the thumb.

‘What do we need three for?’ Aoife said. ‘Mammy won’t want a bite of chocolate for her dinner, will you, Mammy?’ Their mammy didn’t turn from the sink, or give any indication that she’d even heard. Aoife sighed. There were times when she would answer a direct question and times when she wouldn’t. She had her good days and bad days. ‘She’ll barely eat any of her dinner as it is, never mind a chocolate bar.’

‘It’s not for my mammy,’ Damien replied.

‘Who’s it for, then?’ Aoife asked, although she already knew the answer.

‘It’s for my daddy.’

‘Daddy’s not here, but.’

Damien shrugged.

‘How did you get the money for the extra bar, then?’

‘It was only twenty pence,’ Damien whispered.

‘Did you steal it?’

He shook his head.

‘How did you pay for it, then, Damien?’

‘Mary-Jo McBride from down the street lent it to me.’

‘Are you serious?’ Aoife was sore tempted to shake her wee brother then, to pick him up and rattle him from side to side as if he was a piggy-bank she was trying to get the last coin from, the last twenty-pence piece. If Mary-Jo McBride knew that the Brennans were scrounging money then soon enough everyone on the island of Ireland would know about it. ‘What did you tell her, Damien Brennan?’

‘I just says I was short.’

‘Fuck sake,’ Aoife hissed, then clamped a hand up and over her mouth. She looked down at Damien, who didn’t seem put out one way or the other by the profanity, then she turned to see if her mammy had heard and was going to give her into trouble. No danger of that, though. ‘Away into the living room, then,’ Aoife said to her brother, ‘and I’ll get your dinner made.’

It took Aoife a long time to cook the dinner that night. Over the previous months she’d grown used to having a hand in the feeding of the family, but it was normally just setting the forks and plates out for the takeaway food, or opening a bag of lettuce so as they could have a salad along with the mince and onion pie that her daddy brought home, steaming hot, from the butcher. She’d never had to prepare a dinner from scratch.

There were the practical considerations, of course, like figuring out how to get the gas lit without using the lighter that her daddy carried in his pocket and working out how long to boil the potatoes for. In the end, after a search that included all the pockets of her mammy’s assorted aprons, Aoife found a box of matches high on a shelf to the side of the cooker. She needed to climb up onto a stool to reach. It wasn’t the only thing up on the shelf; there was also a ten-glass of gin, half-empty and lying on its side. Aoife left that where it was and set the large pan of water on to boil. Then she turned her mind to the timings. An hour seemed like a reasonable length of time to cook the potatoes for. If they were still hard after that, then she could always put them back on for another half-hour or so.

As the pan bubbled away, Aoife seated herself on the kitchen counter and slipped two pills in under her mammy’s tongue. Back in the day, Cathy Brennan would have shouted at her daughter for sitting up on the counter and probably would have given Aoife a swift slap for trying to hold onto her nose and wait for her mouth to open so as the pills could be popped in.

By the time the three of them sat down at the table with a plate of grey-looking corned beef hash in front of them, it was already well past Damien’s bedtime. At first Aoife and Damien both crammed the food into their mouths, slopping it upwards with their forks as quickly as they could. Aoife’s appetite soon drained away, though. The potatoes sat in an ever-growing puddle of water and, even with a piled forkful of meat added, they tasted of nothing and slumped off the fork like the collapse of a soggy sandcastle. Cathy hadn’t eaten more than a mouthful of it. Aoife looked across at Damien, but he was more interested in his nails than the half-filled plate in front of him. Standing up, and tucking two of the Mars bars into the pocket of her wee brother’s trousers, Aoife sent him off to bed.

Damien wanted her to come up the stairs to tuck him in and share the extra chocolate bar, but she point-blank refused. At that moment, with the disappointment of the failed dinner producing tears that burned their way down her cheeks, she just wanted to be rid of him, so as she could actually do something about the situation they found themselves in. As her wee brother climbed the stairs, Aoife made her way out into the hallway, lifted the phone from its hook and listened to the dialling tone. She hesitated. Upstairs, the cold tap was turned on as Damien began brushing his teeth. Downstairs, the hot tap was turned on as her mammy refilled the sink. Aoife dialled.

I have my doubts. That first night, I have my doubts. All tooled up and with somewhere to go, but I’ve the butterflies. Maybe butterflies is wrong. The wee bastards zipping about in my stomach definitely have stingers on the end of them, so they do. Maybe it’s wasps I have inside me. I’ve tried to drown them with vodka, but the drink just makes them more vicious. I’m near enough doubled over with the cramps and cringes of it.

We step outside the Rangers Supporters’ Club and wait for the private taxi that Billy called for. He’s gripping at my arse with one hand and whispering thickly in my ear.

When the taxi comes, I give the driver the address in Damascus Street and settle back into the seat. I found the deserted house the week before. The door swings loose on its hinges and there’s a fierce smell of cat’s piss, but it has four walls and a roof. I need nothing more. As the car speeds along Great Victoria Street, Billy sets to fumbling. He clasps and claws at the hem of my skirt. I’m ready to stop him if he reaches the knickers, if he gets close to discovering the surprise ahead of time, but he seems to have a fair amount of trouble getting the skirt to ride up. Not to worry, he’ll get his dues soon enough. The bottle waits, carefully placed, its edges sharp and uneven.

If I’m not meant to do this, then there’ll be a sign. Something will pull me up short of actually going through with it. Not that I’m expecting a blinding light or anything like that there. No, Jesus doesn’t live in Belfast any more. He’s much talked of, but never present. I’m just hoping for a minor car crash, a freak snowstorm, maybe a gentlemanly action from Billy. Come on to fuck, now. None of those is going to happen and I know it.

‘You know what they should do?’ I hiss, leaning in close as we pull up outside the house in Damascus Street. I’m wantingto have one final check, just to make sure. ‘They should let the army come down here, right into the Holylands, and allow them to just open up on the Fenian student scum that live here.’