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NB: still rough. please have patience.
...
Easter should have belonged to the living, if only by default. But it came and went, and Christ continued to dangle, like a shank of salted meat.
So much for the come back kid.
Ours was the other Easter, the mortal kind, circumscribed by a minute’s silence. Our Easter committed the sin of pride, and understood about finality.
Mammy wept, with all the other sallow faced tragedians, and we got given lapel pins as an act of commemoration .
I held my tongue, but it made no sense to me that we offer the dead our silences. From what I had seen, they had enough of those to be getting along with. I closed my eyes and I pictured the living, mutinously. I pictured Padraic, alone on the farm, and I pictured Padraic’s friend in his one room bedsit, and I give my silence to them instead. At least they would know what to do with it.
When the men come round we had songs. It was songs or it was silence. Memory so seldom chooses prose. I listened to my mother, forget not the boys of the heather, who rallied their bravest and best…
Because that was us, that was our family. That was Padraic and James Killoughry, and their fathers and grandfathers before them. And that’s where she’d come from, and that’s where she’d lived, among the true hearts of The West.
I wondered about Nana’s heart. I tried not to. I’d been told not to. But I couldn’t help it. I been one year without her, without them. I been one year well, without signs or portents. I knew though, I always knew, that he dead would be back with the blackbirds, that the dead were just biding their time.
…
Easter should have belonged to the living, but that was our tough luck.
The cold cut to the chase, a bright but bitter spring. Gritters rumbled the road in the morning, and Big Jim’s cockatiels froze to death in the garden. The heaters still hissed in the houses. By night the bigger boys ran wild.
And we ran with them. Older now, and fast growing in to our habits of hating, we found ourselves frequently in trouble.
It wasn’t that we swallowed any of Big Jim’s doctrinal doggerel. It was the need to have something to kick against, and Hun would do.
That’s just the way it was. You have to understand about hate, how hate is like greatness. Some are born hateful, some achieve hatefulness, and others still have hatefulness thrust upon them. When you are born they hand you your hate and tell you to make something of it. If you can’t, if you don’t, you are, in some obscure way, letting yourself and everybody down.
The raw wound of history smarts so, and besides, what else is there for us to own? Dispossessed and done out of everything, you hand hate down like the family silver because there’s nothing to inherit.
This was something we’d just begun to understand. We had no words for it, this thing that was filling us up, but we took it inside ourselves nonetheless. It got us where we were green in our grassroots, and it give us something, something other than purposeless poverty. It brought colour. It give us a kind of momentum.
You have to understand, but you won’t.
You lived and you hated. You hated to live. It couldn’t go any other way. Hate lasted, you see. Hate was immortalising. Hate made things matter. Hate was the next best thing to being dead, the only thing that kept you from meaning nothing.
Not that we’d have put it that way.
Back then, when the bigger boys ran wild, we just wanted to be part of something. We looked up to the glass- breakers and fire-setters. We looked up to the tattooed street brawlers and the petty pigeon-chested hard men.
We were groomed for this, had been all our lives. We took to it too, passionate criminals with short life-expectancies.
And over the other side of The Rise they were schooling our opposite numbers.
So Easter came up on us lawlessly, while we were learning how to hate. But at the back of mind there was something else. At the back of mind there was Nana. There was Nana and the dead, just looking for an in.
And then they found one.
…
Fire was a less a force of nature and more a force of habit here. You saw it a lot, you were used to it. But the fire that took the terraces, that was something else. People died in that fire, kiddies, that fire was a fire too far.
The burning brought them back, riding in on combustion’s coattails, blown on the brick dust in to the street. The dead come rolling in, crowding and crowing, baptising the skyline redly. Back without the benefit of sorrowful mystery. They did not need God’s permission. They were already on first name terms with infinity. Theirs was a different sort of resurrection, an airborne, memorialising heat. Rebirth for them was a scorched earth policy, they shot ever upward, following the fire.
While the white well-meaning Christ child kicked up his heels on the cross, the dead rolled away stones of their own. They popped from the tomb like corks, part fantailed phoenix, part jack in the box.
The dead. The indomitable dead.
We sat on the porch roof watching. The flames felt so close you could catch the heat off them, the sirens so loud that they hurt you. It was like the whole fucking world was burning. I don’t ever remember anything like it. When I was a babby the farm had a fire, but nothing like this. Besides, city don’t burn the way country does.
We come in through the window and Lucia says she ought to slap us silly. She says we’re supposed to stay indoors until they’ve put the fire out. Our eyes are watering and our faces are smutted. What is it, Luci? Sunny goes, what’s burning? Aunty Luci shakes her head. Just stay inside, boys, she goes, stay out of trouble.
From the upstairs window we watched, then. Sunny, the fire, and me, the dead, as they roiled over the rooftops.
…
We went down with sticks when the fire was out, but they’d put a cordon up. The front of the terrace had all fallen in. It looked like an anatomical model, cut away to reveal the cancer that had blackened the building’s innards. That and the roof had caved like a cavity, resembling now, nothing more than a diseased tooth.
Water dripped from the gasolined grotto inside. We stood on our tiptoes but we couldn’t see more, then men come and chased us away.
Joe goes how some lad at school had lived there. We’re all wise how it could have been us that went up. Let’s go, says Ryan, there’s nothing left to look at. I follow Ryan with the rest, but I can see what they can not. On the lawn with the fire-damaged furniture, the dead are warming their cockles. The new ones grin with their burnt peoples’ faces, as if they are pleased to see us. Nana, leans on the warped grey gatepost. She wags her finger at me. She is trying to tell me something.
Only, I do not know what.
…
Ryan’s uncle says it wasn’t an accident, but we knew that already.
Ryan’s uncle says the police won’t help us, but that’s hardly news either. Ryan’s uncle says we have to help ourselves, that we can’t let them get away with it. Ryan’s uncle talks about justice.
Justice. Just is. Justice. Just is. I am miles away. They, he says. At first I think he is talking about the dead.
Ryan’s uncle thumps the table with his fist, making the foldaway flaps collapse, like a pair of broken wings. Bastards think they can burn us out, he says, and he does some pretty heroic swearing.
We go to them, says Ryan’s uncle, we take the fight to them. You boys know what needs to be done? And Frankie and Don and Thomas go aye. And Ryan and Joe and Sunny go aye.
And me.
…
Nana come in at the window that night. The thing about being dead, says Nana, is what you do is you try to stop infinity from absorbing you. Because the thing is, Nana says, the thing is the dead are like water, and left to their own devices they will take on the shape of whatever void or vessel they are poured in to. So what you do, says Nana, is you concentrate.
Or else you will disappear, Nana?
Disappear? Christ no, stupid boy. Or else you will expand.
Expand, Nana?
But Nana does not elaborate. It is difficult for the dead to do concentrating. I know this. Expand, Nana? I prompt her again. Nana drifts behind the headboard, up by the damp patch. She wrings her hands. You haven’t any edges, she says, it spreads you too thin, it spreads you too thin.
Why are you telling me, Nana?
But Nana won’t talk any more. I fall asleep. In my dream I can see that the dead are on the move. They do not glide, but plod, dawdle, limp. They crawl and they leapfrog. Never through, but always over the world of the living, like bugs, like rats.
Like a snowball rolling down hill, they gather weight and pace as they go. They make a special stop outside Lisburn to yank the boys from the H blocks out by their hair. Then they’re off again, wailing and gnashing their teeth. Give us your bloody silences, will you? Here is what we think of your silences. Shit for your silences.
The dead dragged the drowned out the Boyne, still hissing and spitting, fighting like mink in a fur-trader’s sack. They come tramping disguised as gravediggers, mucking in all over Milltown cemetery, kicking each other, cursing their comrades for lazy drunken fuckers. Get up! Get up! Get up! They make themselves pretty, pulling shards of glass out their face as they walk, spitting up bullets like boxers do loose teeth.
The dead are incredibly coarse. The dead do not hold still. The dead wave their right to remain silent. Manners are for the living.
A woman in a blue smock pushes a wheelbarrow full of what might have been babbies. She is singing cockles and muscles alive, alive-oh.
I see now, Nana, quite clearly. Silence is just something else to expand in to. And nothing is more terrible than that. The dead are reaching critical mass.
I wake with a start. I go downstairs and drink water from the facet. I shiver in the kitchen, watch my bare feet turn blue. I rub my arms where the cold itches my latest tattoo. I scratch at the scab ‘til a bubble of blood comes up. Then I go and get dressed.
I walk over to Ryan’s.
…
Nana had always said the living were out to get you. Nana had always said it, and I had always known it. And here they were, here we were. The living were out to get each other. The living were out to get themselves.
They would say on the telly, how the riot erupted. Riots were always erupting. It was meant to make them sound spontaneous, elemental. Sunny summed up our feelings one time when he said it sounded like squeezing spots, like popping fucking pimples. But in truth, it wasn’t even like that.
A slow ooze, is what it was. It was like the damp or the dry rot, the cistern overflowing, nobody noticed until it was too late, and we were up to our elbows in violence like stagnant shit.
The fumes made it hard to focus or function, but we went at it all the same. The passive, who believed that being there was enough, complicated things. They had banners for peace, as if they didn’t know protest had perished in sixty-nine.
You’re calm when you’re doing violence. Calm but confused. I know you think that chaos would panic you, but it doesn’t. It makes things unreal, you see. Because it’s unreal you don’t feel for what you’re doing. The momentness numbs you. There’s too much to take in so you don’t take in anything. Your engine floods. Saturation.
The sun was coming up. The light come off the cars they got banked up in the street to stop us passing. And fuck them. Fuck the fire. Not a reason, not even an excuse. We were beyond that.
We were honouring the dead. And then. And then…
I remember feeling the cold.
I remember feeling the cold and wanting to rest. My mouth was dry and my legs were tired, tired like I had been swimming, clumsy, muscle-tired, waterlogged. I put my finger in my ear and pressed down on the drum, ‘cause I thought that my ears had popped. It seemed to have got very quiet. I don’t remember a pain, not as such, not sharp like you’d think. More a winded, punched-in-the-gut sort of ache. And I remember feeling very cold.
I think I walked for a while.
It wasn’t that I had anywhere to go. It wasn’t I was trying to get anywhere, the body just had some more movement to spend. I walked away from The Lodge. I got down by the cool of the curb. I thought I might just go to sleep. I remember feeling very cold.
Time doesn’t move like you’d think it would.
Things didn’t speed up, they slowed right down. The living couldn’t see me. The dead ignored me. This is because the living and the dead have something in common. The dying belong to elsewhere, their status is special, excluded from infinity at either end.
I remember feeling very cold. My belly was warm and wet with blood. I’d been stabbed. I was dying. It’s a gentler way to go than you’d imagine. A loss of blood is nothing at all. There’d been things that had hurt me much more than this.
I was dying. Don come bent now beside me. When he picked me up it was the feeling of flying. It don’t hurt, Don, I’m expanding, that’s all, I got to concentrate.
And that’s the last thing I remember before hospital and the rest of the life the dead had planned for me.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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we are not amused
