This Human Season Read online

  At the entrance to the housing estate there was a great mural on the side of one of the first houses, a portrait of one of the first Volunteers killed. Someone had been out the night before and painted on the wall the slogan, ‘Republic of Ballymurphy’. The women nudged each other.

  A man came towards them who worked part time up at The Fiddlers. With his hands in his pockets too, he nodded at them. Collette looked after him. ‘He’s got a cow of a wife, the poor man. It’s desperate cold, it’s going to snow if it keeps on like this.’

  ‘No it won’t. Rain is all we’re good for and rain is all we’ll get. It’s got to get down below freezing for snow.’

  ‘Well it’s freezing fucking cold.’

  ‘And that’s what they said was it? Everywhere else they’re saying, “With the temperature falling below freezing point, we foresee the possibility of snow,” but here it’s, “Good even’n to yous, it’s fucking freezing cold, so it is, and what with the rubber bullets, mind you keep a hand on your bollocks.”’

  They were on the Whiterock road, with the cemetery ahead of them, topsy-turvy gravestones and memorials amongst long grass. As they came up the hill they could see down across Belfast, over the river and the factories, they could see little Divis Tower, orange like a Lego block to the left and the spire of St Peters. Down beyond was East Belfast and from where they stood the hills behind it seemed low, conceding to the general falling away of the land over the Irish Sea, towards England.

  They were stopped at a road-block. A Saracen was parked across the street and there were two soldiers standing outside, one with a gun, the other ready to go through bags.

  Collette handed over her bag. ‘A hand grenade, a semi-automatic, some gelignite . . .’ she reeled off. Kathleen offered hers. The soldier had his gloves off to unzip it. They bought the bags with the most zips, it gave a certain advantage.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, going from the main compartment to the six small pockets on the front. She’d put a tampon in each one, and he went through them, giving nothing away, but she and Collette had a snigger and knew it would grow in the telling.

  ‘All right ladies,’ he said, flexing his knuckles and blowing his hands against the cold, ‘on your way.’

  They went off, arms linked now, down past the more groomed part of the cemetery. ‘How’s your Sean, love? Any news?’

  ‘Father Pearse saw him last week. He’s all right so far as I could make out. The Father’s not himself though, it must get to you seeing them like that. Sean’s not getting his confession. I know it’s not the end of the world but I can’t help thinking it would give him comfort. He’s not like the other boys. He’s always been one for the church. Quietly. You know boys that age don’t let on much. I’ve got a visit with him on the twelfth. I tell you, I’m that desperate lonely without him in the house. We’re two of a kind, me and Sean, he’s the one of all of them who’s the most like me. On the inside.’

  She looked at Collette. Who was the luckier? What kind of bargains could be made? Dear God, if only . . . Kathleen flushed.

  Their feet broke out into a fair tempo as the hill descended sharply on to the Falls Road.

  ‘Did you hear about that other screw this week? The INLA are claiming it,’ said Collette.

  ‘Aye, a wages clerk or whatever they’re putting out he was. What I say is them screws are soldiers just the same as the others walking about round here. Worse ’cause they’re only doing it for the money. God knows what they think they’re bringing on themselves! Them with their sticks on naked unarmed men! Sean’s granddaddy was a prize fighter. He always used to say, “The one to watch is the one with nothing to lose.” Sean’s a lot like him, though he’s not so ignorant.’

  When they got to the Falls Road, they went to cross at the roundabout. Collette put her hand on Kathleen’s forearm as a Saracen came speeding past. They stood still.

  ‘There’s a rumour, Kathleen, about the boys on the protest taking it further.’

  Kathleen took a deep breath, moving off, her lungs filling with cold air, a foot dropping from the pavement on to the road; a sudden miss, the rest of your body unprepared, the mishap that shunts you from a near-dream to waking.

  They walked a few yards in silence up towards Milltown cemetery. Kathleen put her hand out and a black cab swung in beside them.

  ‘What about ye,’ they said as they got in, nodding at the two other women on the far side. There was a young girl on a stool in the middle.

  ‘Just as far as Andytown, thanks Jim.’

  ‘Aye, all right love. News from your Patrick?’ he asked Collette.

  ‘Not much. Same as ever,’ she said. She was on the pull-down spring seat, alongside him but facing the other way. Kathleen sat in front of her, chin on her palm, gazing across the scrap yard. Collette leant forward then appeared to change her mind, leant her head against the Perspex.

  When they got up towards Andersonstown, the cab had to pull over because of the riots. Kathleen and Collette gave the driver their five pence each and got out quickly. A group of boys had waylaid a ‘pig’, as the armoured cars were known, by throwing beer barrels in its path so that, wedged, it was unable to advance or retreat. A troop of soldiers was coming down the street from Lenadoon and the teenage boys behind the pig were throwing stones at them. Behind the teenagers were groups of smaller boys crouching, holding bags and boxes of stones and a few others preparing petrol bombs.

  Kathleen knew that the moment one of the petrol bombs was thrown, the soldiers would open up with the rubber bullets. She looked around. To the right side of the street, half hidden by a bus shelter, was a boy putting a long piece of rag into the neck of a milk bottle. Liam.

  She saw her 13-year-old boy, his face a mask, with the smile that isn’t a smile but a challenge, an affront upon which he depended. This face she’d seen already in the urgent tenor of his games; ready to kill. All the talk of the ’Ra and of guns and bombs, all the shouting in the back yard and in the street, immoderate and uncontrollable outside, noisy and messy inside, it was all a training they put themselves through, the boys. She saw him about to make a move, frowning like a footballer taking a goal, aware of the other boys looking at him, his jar aloft as a signal. She saw the boy next to him cupping his hands around a match, tending it for her Liam.

  In a flash, she was across the street and had him by an ear, dragging him backwards into a shop doorway, swearing.

  ‘Where’s your fucking sister?’

  Collette called her name and Kathleen turned to see her and Aine standing in a shop doorway with Aine’s hair, wet from the swimming pool, hanging like icicles, dripping. Kathleen hustled Liam across to them. Aine’s cheeks were rough-skinned, red and chapped and Kathleen wondered why she hadn’t seen before that they needed Vaseline on them. She looked into Aine’s green eyes, and saw how the top lashes were black and long and the bottom lashes pale and short. Her own baby girl born in 1969, when the Troubles began.

  ‘Come on, let’s move.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ Liam said.

  ‘Don’t make me give you a good hiding in front of your pals and the

  Brits.’ She pushed his back. ‘Get walking.’

  ‘I’ll not be trusting you with Aine again,’ she shouted, running them up the street as rubber bullets hit the road. They rounded a corner and stood together, catching their breath.

  ‘Where were the bloody Purcell boys?’

  ‘Them? They went off – the great girls.’

  ‘Well they could have made sure yous were all right before they did.’ It was a long walk back and no hope of a cab.

  ‘The great useless sacks of shite. Fat lumps.’ Kathleen was growing more upset as they walked. Suddenly she exploded in tears and anger and turned and smacked Liam around the head. ‘I just can’t live like this any more!’

  Her boy assessed the impact of her blow, head on one side, eyes averted, saying nothing.

  ‘Your own sister! You don’t go and get her killed, d’you
hear me? She’s the only good one I’ve got. I might as well just about give up on you.’

  And then his mother went on ahead with Aine.

  ‘I’m joining the Fianna Cubs!’ he shouted, watching his mother and sister going on at a fair pace, hand-in-hand, walking the same way, shoulders hunching, making much work for their rears.

  ‘Jesus, Joseph and Mary,’ said Collette, waiting alongside him. ‘As if your going and dying is going to change anything, except for breaking your mother’s heart.’

  ‘She doesn’t care about me. She only cares about him! About Sean!’ Kathleen turned around in the drizzle. She could see Liam as a little boy standing in the empty bath, soap in hand, rounded tummy sticking out and v-shaped mickey underneath, his eyes and mouth about to burst, looking for her to save him when his father was shouting. It was family life that made you the way you were, that made your kids the way they were and nothing was irreversible but there was a general direction. It was too hard to bear if you thought about it as a whole, you had to divide the awful task of raising children into days of trials and tempers, minutes of love, seconds of comprehension.

  She redoubled her hold on Aine and they set forth with the purpose of the last hill in the light rain. She was thinking how she’d sat next to him on the settee the night before and put her arm round him, stroked the golden hairs on his forearm, felt how his shoulders were narrow like old furniture, well turned but for smaller folk. She was sick of crying. She couldn’t keep crying. She’d have to use her brain and do something. For all of them. She couldn’t count on her husband.

  Collette had stayed back with the boy but now she started to walk on too. Only Liam stood still, rain-browed, watching the women going up the hill, past the grey stone walls of the cemetery, against the weather.

  Chapter 6

  He went to the duty officer’s at five to clock off with the others covering their mouths, sharing some kind of a joke. He was sent straight back. Overtime was not optional.

  He rejoined the evening stupor in the mess. Shandy was dozing, his feet up, and Frig was trawling through his newspaper, having read out everyone’s horoscope. Shandy came to momentarily, considered whether to wake and hedged his bets with a single eye open, passing his tongue over his lips. Frig gave his paper a prod. ‘I bloody love these problem pages. “Dear Irma, My husband wants me to see a doctor because I don’t have an orgasm. Is there something wrong with me?” She’s even put down her name and address. No phone number.’

  ‘Not signed Mrs Higgins is it?’ said Shandy, with a slow-burning grin.

  ‘Nah,’ said Frig, a thumb twiddling at a nostril, ‘she always comes like clockwork your Marjorie. Digs her nails in.’ He looked up, making sure he’d gauged their responses, each of them. Shandy caught a belch in the closed purse of his mouth.

  ‘Christ, I bet you behave like a prince when you get home.’

  John Dunn put his cigarette out. Shandy got up and ran a mug full of water, which he drank down in one.

  Frig held up the front page with its black and white picture of Gilligan, the murdered prison officer, alongside his own head. ‘Shot dead point blank through his windscreen on his way home. Twenty-five. That could have been me on that page there. He was three years younger than me and they had kids, but you get my drift lads. Makes you think doesn’t it.’

  ‘His wife will still be a young woman. My Marjorie’s no spring chicken, and the kids are after this and that for school all the time. There’s nothing for the widows when we go. They’ve conveniently forgotten that part. Aye, they pay us well while we’re alive, the Brits, but they’ve done their sums, make no mistake.’ Shandy looked up, drawing up before the rough ground of his thinking. ‘The Brits don’t have to live here. As long as it’s not them getting killed, they don’t care. But when it’s over on the mainland now that’s another story, so it is. By God, don’t they go on about it then, one small bomb in Woolworth’s and it’s all over the papers, meanwhile us lot over here are lucky to see in a new day.’

  Dunn checked his watch, thoughts undercover.

  ‘You know what I’m saying’s true. I’m right am I not, Mr Dunn?’ Everybody had to be right – outside the army. In the army you signed up and you did whatever you were told to do. But outside you couldn’t just be following orders you had to be right as well. A soldier took a side because he had to and it was better to stand with those you knew you could trust if you had to stand with anyone, and you severed whatever vein or nerve there is that runs between your head and your hands. Bayoneting sacks of straw seemed funny at first when they were spotty seventeen-year-olds, limbering up in the cold air, getting shouted at it.

  ‘Move it! Move it you sorry lot!’ There they were, late-autumn light, hands on hips, careful not to grin. ‘Make no mistake boys, there’s no better way to kill a man, you look him in the eyes, twist the blade, pull it back out with his guts on and you know he’s dead. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we’re paid to do.’

  * * *

  Campbell walked in the mess early evening, heading for the coffee jar, giving his mug a good two spoonfulls, putting in milk and sugar before the hot water.

  ‘Gilligan’s funeral tomorrow, Mr Campbell.’

  ‘Will PO cancel visits?’ asked Shandy.

  ‘Aye, prison rule. Nothing Mr Bolton can do about that. Take heart, lads. The streakers are getting a special breakfast from me tomorrow, three fifths of two thirds of fuck all. And I’ll have a special wee surprise for the bastards as well. Right, now what’s for my tea-time.’

  Campbell shook the bread wrapper, pressed his palms upon the last thick crust that remained. Shandy handed him the crumb-strewn margarine tub and Campbell set to complaining that they were a bunch of animals.

  Frig took it upon himself to skim the top off the margarine with a knife.

  After the prisoners’ tea was served and lockup done, Dunn was allowed off. It was about nine. Campbell got the front door guard to let him out. ‘I’ve told the lads to come in early tomorrow. Want you in at five.’

  ‘Five?’

  ‘Have you got a problem with that, Dunn?’

  Baxter was being let out with him. He had a pile of the PO’s dirty washing under his arm. Dunn heard him swear. As they reached the next set of grilles and the officer inspected their passes and directed them their separate ways, Baxter looked at him in the acid glare of the nighttime lighting. ‘Fuel on the fire that is,’ he said, ‘it can only make things worse for you lot.’

  Dunn watched him away, nursing his bundle, head down.

  * * *

  Driving out of the prison in the dark, he started to turn over the events of his first day in his head.

  The image of his grandfather came to mind again, the old man down on one knee examining a piece of turf he’d dug. And him, standing on the day of his fifteenth birthday, just the other side of the garden gate, looking but not asked in. ‘See you then.’ He went down King Street, saw the recruiting sergeant, then went back to his mother, one last time, for a signature.

  When it came to the army, Dunn had nothing to lose and everything to give. He was a blank slate. It was the army that taught him to shave when there was nothing to shave. The other lads had personal possessions to be taken off them. Not him. One or two stuck photos on their lockers, their mothers, their girlfriends – it was fair game to laugh at the girlfriends, but they didn’t like you laughing at the pictures of their mothers.

  He went into the Royal Electric and Mechanical Engineers, the REME, because no one else did, became a storeman. In 1960 he became a lance corporal, then a corporal when he was in Cyprus and he didn’t want to go any further. The men that stayed corporals were good blokes, reliable, neither too close, nor too far from the men themselves. They got the job done. He’d done twenty-two years in the army, a few months in military intelligence, begun a law degree and ditched it. He was thirtynine now. It was a new start, but not from scratch.

  He came into the city via the motorway. It e
nded abruptly presenting him with the choice of west or east. He felt a lurch of fear that was akin to excitement; fight or flight.

  It was like a love affair that was bad for him, Belfast. A guilty secret. He had spent time in other countries with the army: Cyprus, Germany, Aden, but he’d stayed on in Belfast after his last tour of duty. Not because of Angie, because of Belfast. Because of what he’d seen and done here. Others left for the same reason. Many of the men he knew would never come back willingly. He couldn’t leave.

  By ten in the evening, Belfast was long into the night. He had noted the day before that at three forty-five in the afternoon it was twilight and at three forty-six exactly it was night-time. By four the night had taken over entirely and only the street lights made any sense of the moat of dark countryside in which the city of Belfast lay. The mountains, dense and heavy-browed to the west were to him like Ireland in waiting, Ireland at bay; they were disarmed only by the night that made all things even. The evening presided. For a good part of the day it was close at hand; the quiet settling in, settling down, the gloom, the waiting, the menace, the other person close by, the window showing nothing. This was his place, this evening kingdom. Not England.

  He went there first of all in 1969, as a corporal but in civvies, driving around units, collecting and delivering stores. He took a sleeping bag wherever he went and slept where he ended the day. He got to know people everywhere. Catholics and Protestants. He did twenty-five thousand miles in four months. He fell in love with the place; the countryside that took your breath away. Up and over the brow of one hill, plunging down into a valley ready for the next, like a green roller-coaster. He found the people of the north hard but sentimental, with their savage bad feeling, their grievances, loyalties to die for. He’d had his dinner once with a Catholic family in Armagh, they’d joked about the chicken being poisoned.