This Human Season Read online

  ‘Bella, he says, beautiful it means. He’s talking about her, there, the wife. And he brings out a gun, a Luger. I says how much, and he says four pound. I says I’ll take eight . . .’

  Brendan Coogan was standing next to her.

  ‘Hello Mr Moran.’

  ‘Oh Brendan,’ Sean smiled. ‘What about ye? Bearing up?’

  ‘I am, thank you.’

  ‘And my lad’s all right? Keeping in touch with you is he?’

  ‘He’s sound, as far as I know.’

  ‘Let me buy you a wee drink there.’ Coogan shook his head, but Sean insisted.

  ‘A whiskey then,’ said Coogan. ‘Hello Mrs Moran, how are you doing?’

  ‘Not so bad thank you, Brendan.’ Kathleen stood down from the stool.

  ‘Excuse me a minute. I’ll come and have a word with you about our

  Sean if you’re stopping a while.’

  She went off to the Ladies where she looked again in the mirror and wiped the traces of smudged mascara from under her eyes with toilet paper.

  When she came out, Brendan was at the side of the young group he was with. His eyes were quiet and dark as he watched her approach and he set down his beer. She took the chair next to him. The group looked at her briefly and went back to their discussion. He bent his head forwards so that it was next to hers.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about how I could get to see your breasts in the daylight again.’ He took a cigarette from his friend’s pack and offered it to her. He lit it, then passed it over, exhaling smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘You were right the other day though. I’ve been thinking about it, Brendan, we can’t go on.’

  ‘One more time.’

  ‘No. I just can’t, Brendan.’

  ‘Ah come on now, don’t look so sad and so serious.’ He nudged her elbow with his own and handed her his pint to sip from. As she drew the foam across the top of the liquid, she caught the eye of one of the crowd he was with, an older man from Andytown, and smiled. ‘Aye, that’s a nice pint, I’ve never tasted that before.’ Then she leant forwards and said to him, ‘Your mother asked me if you’d helped me out you know.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he cracked a smile and brushed a hand against her knee under the table.

  ‘It won’t be long before people get to know.’ She half rose on her seat, gave a curt wave to Sean and Collette and prepared to leave.

  ‘Sit a bit longer,’ he said, staying her knee with his hand. ‘Are you all right, Kathleen?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Look, I’ll keep an eye out for your Sean.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette, glanced at the man opposite who was speaking to the woman alongside him with his eyes all the while on Kathleen.

  ‘Aye,’ she exhaled smoke. ‘Well just don’t let him die if you can help it. I’ve got to go now.’

  The chair scraped, making a painful sound, and she went across the wooden floor towards the bar where Sean was letting Guinness run over the sides of a pint glass, looking at her.

  The bar door burst open and Dominic O’Hanlon fell through, a garland of dirty cotton wool over his eyes and one round his neck, a beer-splashed red jacket, red trousers and a gnomish hat on his head. Two men close to the door moved to hold him up.

  ‘A glass of Guinness for Rudolph! If you’d be so kind there. And a gasper for Bouncer if you’ve one to spare.’

  Chapter 49

  Loud and angry discordant guitar-strokes squashed the quiet verse of the traditional folk music. An impresario singer offered, with sarcasm, ‘a show’. Music rolled and broke in waves. There was the sound of a plane plummeting out of control and then silence, followed by the crying of a newborn.

  ‘Mama loves her baby,

  And Daddy loves you too

  And the sea may look warm to you babe

  And the sky may look blue’

  The anger of the drum and guitar took the harmony away again, dashing it to the rocks. A new beat, watchful and constant, emerged; a hospital monitor interspersed with a guitar riff glimmering like sudden rays of sunshine. A whispering voice was singing a warning:

  ‘Daddy’s flown across the ocean

  Leaving just a memory

  A snapshot in the family album’

  The music took its time, moving at the pace of a heartbeat, creating tension,

  ‘All in all it was just a brick in the wall’

  Then came the sound of helicopter blades turning, the roaring of a military man, followed by cymbals being struck like physical blows. The evils of the teacher.

  Gerard was shaking his head at Sean, as if at a great distance, shocked. Before he could say anything an anthem struck up like a protest march. It sounded like the modern age. It was the sound of conviction. Sean felt the adrenalin of right and wrong surge within him.

  ‘We don’t need no education

  We don’t need no thought control

  No dark sarcasm in the classroom’

  The song seemed to be advancing the perfect cause, overturning the wrong laws, and when the children sang in unison they conveyed certainty and loyalty, love and survival. Guitar riffs soared, one after the other.

  There were playground sounds. Sean closed his eyes and laid back; a dream was being piped into his head, ready made. He thought of being about five or six at school. Then came to his mind an image of a baby with his mouth at a nipple, resolute and sucking, adhering to its mother. Like baby Liam. Then, out of nowhere, someone took the baby away, shook it, smacked it so that it screamed then handed it back, and the baby stopped its crying gradually and went back to sucking, albeit with occasional shudders. He remembered the water bucket at Castlereagh, held by the neck in the water until his eyes flooded with darkness and then his head was pulled out and each time he was on the brink of unconsciousness.

  After the playground came the sound of a shouting-schoolmaster, a man with a voice the sound of failure; thin and hysterical. Then came the ringing of a phone. It stopped. A man exhaled.

  ‘Mother do you think they’ll drop the bomb

  Mother do you think they’ll like this song

  Mother do you think they’ll try to break my balls

  Mother should I build the wall’

  The voice was clear, it had a lilt to it. He and Gerard exchanged looks. Gerard grinned.

  ‘Béal Mor’s lost his mind. This isn’t in the rule book.’

  ‘It’s great.’

  ‘The words, Seany! The words!’

  ‘Mother will they put me in the firing line?

  Is it just a waste of time?’

  The music moved off and away, travelling on a railroad of guitar chords. They were tapping out the beat with the palms of their hands on their thighs.

  How was it for the others after years in here, with no sky, no animals, no children, no women, no sounds beyond the banging of doors, to hear suddenly all the sounds of the world articulated with a crazy passion, as if a dying man was struggling for his last best memories?

  After a bird-song came the voice of a boy pointing out an airplane and then male voices harmonizing in reverence to the blue sky. It was like a swoon. It touched his heart and he was afraid.

  The music was halted by the sound of a hammer on a dull metal surface. He thought of the Belfast shipyards, saw the cranes. A man intoned despair and then the mood was broken again by rock and roll.

  Gerard’s head nodded fast to it, like a young man at a concert.

  ‘Ooooh I need a dirty woman

  Ooooh I need a dirty girl’

  Sean burst out laughing. Gerard laughed as well.

  ‘She’d have to be a dirty woman, in here!’ he shouted, his hands cupping his mouth.

  The phone rang and this time it was answered. It was a movie within a movie, an American woman moving about, an old British film playing in the background. What did it mean? Could he trust the music?

  ‘Day after day, love turns grey

  Like the skin on a dying man’


  The pure, absurd joy of rock and roll surged forth again and he leapt up, he couldn’t help himself, and with his blanket round his waist he jumped about and Gerard with him. There was shouting and smashing in the music and they charged about their cell like hooligans.

  When the music changed again, they stood still. It was slowing to almost nothing with just the sounds of breathing, a woman in deep sleep.

  ‘Listen,’ said Gerard.

  ‘Did you ever hear The Dark Side of the Moon? That’s Pink Floyd as well. They’re the best band in the world.’

  ‘They are!’

  They stood side by side, nodding in the direction of the door from where the sound came. There was the noise of doors and windows being broken in, breaking glass and a reprise of the earlier anthem.

  ‘I don’t need no arms around me

  And I don’t need no drugs to calm me

  I have seen the writing on the wall

  Don’t think I need any thing at all

  No, don’t think I need anything at all

  All in all it was all just the bricks in the wall

  All in all you were all just bricks in the wall’

  The men started to move, but the music stopped.

  Without warning the singer issued his ‘Goodbye’ and the sound was gone, as if a door had been shut.

  Silence like a knife.

  ‘Well, lads, I’ll give you part two next time. Goodnight.’ And he turned the lights out.

  Sean and Gerard sat down in the dark. There was some distant low light from a watch-tower and soon, when their eyes got used to the dark, they could see the shape of each other.

  ‘I’ve never heard anything like it,’ said Gerard. ‘Imagine if we were doing stuff like that.’

  ‘We ought to get them in the ’Ra.’

  ‘That’s what I should have been doing,’ Gerard went on. ‘Music. They took me away, a teacher who’d never killed a person, and I’ll get back home, one day, and be something else. God knows what.’

  ‘Listen, Gerard, we’re prisoners of war. We’ve got what we believe in and no one can take it away from us.’

  O’Malley called out ‘Merry Christmas’ in Irish, and Sean and Gerard called back.

  ‘They can’t make me a criminal, no matter what they do to me, but what will they make of my two boys? You’re best off if you can be like your man Seamus there, just having your one life, on the inside. It’s easier.’

  ‘Why don’t they talk to each other, Seamus and Seamus?’

  ‘It’s like a bad marriage. They fell out a year ago, and haven’t spoken since.’

  ‘Jesus. If I piss you off, you’ll tell me, right?’

  ‘That music was really something. I might have some dreams tonight. My feet are like fucking ice blocks. Goodnight, Seany.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  His mattress was short. He’d ripped off about a quarter of it in the last couple of months to smear the walls with. He had two blankets but the floor was cold and his mattress was damp. After a while you went numb and then you could sleep. He could hear a man here or there talking, and from further along the sounds of snoring.

  He thought about how the music travelled so far and wide. He had thought of his mother, his brother, his family, his community and he had felt anger and excitement, melancholy too. How powerful music was. Even though life was so barren there, he sometimes felt as if he was just now waking up to the world. He thought of the little boy seeing the plane, how man had brought things that were once mysterious down to size. A sky might have been infinite, a lake might have been a sea, before. Now you looked at them knowing they had borders. Why do people want to kill the magic, he wondered, and give answers to things that shouldn’t be understood. He’d told Father Pearse he was hanging on to his faith.

  ‘Good,’ the priest had replied. ‘Because in a hellhole created by man, you need God’s mystery.’

  ‘Ooooh I need a dirty woman . . .’

  The refrain came back to him. He had air to breathe, food to eat and water to drink but there was a fourth hunger. He thought of Nancy Costello and her words as she left. Maybe she was thinking of him that night. He had an erection. He put his hand down between his legs.

  He could hear that Gerard was asleep. He thought about Nancy with her sharp eyes and soft lips. He thought of undressing her.

  There were footsteps as the screw walked past to push the button on the wall.

  He had an image of her with her hands raised, letting him pull her top over her head, the hair caught for a moment then falling on to her naked shoulders. He would move his eyes from her face to her breasts. He would put his hands on them and kiss her neck and then he would lay her down and let her enjoy his need. He lay awake for some time, the music in his mind, wondering what it was like to have sex with a woman.

  Chapter 50

  ‘What lovely children you have. Little treasures. Now you have a good day tomorrow.’ She wished a Merry Christmas to Mrs O’Sullivan.

  Kathleen was finishing wrapping the last of the presents in the sitting room when her husband came in the door, giving his exaggerated rendition of a sober man. He knocked into the stairs and the coats there fell down to the ground in surrender, one after the other.

  ‘Ah shites,’ he said with a hiss.

  ‘There y’are, drunk as ever, even at Christmas. But sure why should it be different from any other day,’ she said, tape a forefinger, holding two sides of wrapping paper together.

  ‘Here I am. Father fucking Christmas.’

  ‘Shush.’ She glanced up at the ceiling.

  ‘You think that two kids living in West Belfast believe in Santa Claus, do you?’

  ‘Och shut up. Just shut up. Who cares what you think?’

  ‘Aye, who cares what I think. Not you, that’s for real. You’re being straight with me now for once.’

  ‘Aye, well not everyone can be the honest man that you are.’ She stuck the tag on the present, checked there was a message on the back and read it out: ‘Dear Liam, Happy Christmas 1979, love Mum and Dad. I love you.’ She underlined it twice. ‘The presents are done. Can you please put them in your children’s room?’

  He went to the fridge and emerged with a whole piece of cheese that he gnawed at. He put it down on the mantelpiece. He stood before her, his legs apart, one eye closed, a finger pointing as if he were about to make a great speech.

  ‘Aye,’ was all he said, then he picked up the cheese and put it on top of the small stack of presents and went upstairs, barging into the railing with every step. She heard him sit. She knew he’d fall asleep so she ran up after him. He was undressing, sitting down. It took him a long time that way. She stood there looking at him, with his thinning hair, his beer gut and his hopeless hands failing at each task they came to, going twice at each button, three times to one of his socks.

  ‘What?’ he said, looking at her. When he was naked he stood up, took the presents in his arms and went into the children’s room.

  ‘Mother of fucking God!’

  The light went on and as Kathleen ran in she saw her two children, frowning, startled and disgruntled, looking at their father’s naked arse as he turned around and bent down to retrieve the presents. He’d stepped on a hairbrush.

  ‘Och, that’s wonderful,’ said Kathleen. ‘That’s really magical, Sean.’

  ‘You all right, Dad,’ said Liam. Aine sat up, startled.

  ‘Sorry the pair of you,’ said their father, picking up his piece of cheese last of all.

  Chapter 51

  It was Christmas Day. Frig, Shandy and Dunn set off to Clean Jim’s Christmas party. Shandy had tinsel round his cap and was in high spirits. Frig smelt of aftershave. Dunn was feeling down. It was the last place he wanted to be. The three of them went up to the ‘terrapins’, the pre-fab huts that housed their lockers, to pick up a bottle of whiskey.

  ‘We could use a sharpener,’ said Frig.

  They made their way along the corridor between rows of tall grey met
al lockers, each with an officer’s tally number. Many had been personalized with stickers, graffiti, cuttings from newspapers. Three officers were standing having a drink, smoking and laughing. One of them asked Frig if they’d like to take a half ’un, and produced three short glasses. Inside his locker was a row of optics with four bottles inverted over them.

  ‘Your health,’ said the stocky man whose locker bar it was, and they clinked glasses.

  ‘Are you lot on the dirt blocks?’ asked another, who was tall and bald.

  ‘Aye,’ said Shandy, taking a swallow. ‘Ah!’

  ‘Don’t envy you. Jesus, I don’t know how you fellas stick it. Doesn’t it get to you, the smell?’

  ‘He doesn’t normally wear it. It’s just because it’s Christmas.’

  ‘Brut 69, “Splash it all over”.’

  ‘You’re better off on a protest block than on a regular block, mate,’ said Frig. ‘We have the streakers locked up all day, it’s easy street.’

  ‘We’re on a Loyalist block,’ said the stocky man. He had a lazy eye.

  His glass was empty and smeared; he showed it to his friend who refilled it. ‘It’s fucking nerve-racking, so it is. You never know when they’re going to have you.’

  The third man was short, his teeth brown and broken looking. He was nervy like a pony. ‘Young fellas, tattoos, no brains. You’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t such fucking arseholes.’

  ‘We see some things would make your blood run cold,’ said the tall baldy.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Shandy.

  ‘We got that Shankill Butcher man on our block,’ said the short one.

  ‘No one fucks with him.’ Shandy drained his glass.